ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Keynes, the Givenness of Output and the Generality of the General Theory
Author: ANDREWS David
This paper has three central claims. First, Keynes’s construction of his argument as a demonstration that the classical theory is valid only as a special case of a more general theory rather than as a refutation of the "classical theory” springs from the same philosophical approach that underlies Keynes’s ethics and politics. The paper first examines the roots of this approach in a certain British humanist tradition that Keynes inherited through his participation in the famous secret society, the Cambridge Apostles; then it examines his use of this philosophical approach in the construction of his general theory. The special case Keynes associated with the classical theory is that of a given level of output. Professor Garegnani has argued that, contrary to Keynes’s explicit claim, the classical theory he identified was not that of Ricardo. Extending that argument, the paper's second claim is that although Keynes cited Ricardo as the source of the classical theory’s failure to consider the determination of the level of output, he recognized and accepted the reasons for Ricardo's decision to focus on distribution rather than on the determination of the quantity of output. Moreover, Keynes's method of avoiding the problems that Ricardo discerned imposes profound restrictions on Keynes's theory that have been widely ignored. The third claim of the paper is that the generality of the general theory stems from its reliance on a particular equality that reflects the continuity Keynes asserted between the Treatise on Money and the General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. There is a basic symmetry between what Keynes first expressed as the "fundamental equations" and later as the equality of aggregate supply and aggregate demand, in that both equate in some form income, earnings or costs of production on one hand, and expenditure, sales proceeds or receipts, on the other. Moreover, despite Keynes’s use of the language of supply and demand to describe it in the General Theory, this equality bears a much closer resemblance to the condition of reproduction that underlies the reproduction models of Marx and Sraffa than it does to the Marshallian or Walrasian constructions of supply and demand.
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