From Stabilization to Liberation: The Relevance of John Maynard Keynes for Claudio Napoleoni's Economic and Political Thought

This article analyzes Napoleoni’s interpretation of Keynes. The first section will explain Napoleoni’s adoption of Hick’s and Klein’s formalization of Keynes on the ground of his methodological standpoint, according to which simultaneous equations were the suitable tools for accounting for the interdependence between economic variables in a complex system. This approach will be confronted with Pasinetti’s sequential and causal interpretation of Keynes, which Napoleoni addressed in the Discorso sull’economia politica. Moreover, Keynesian policies were seen by Napoleoni as the necessary condition for bringing about a ‘purely capitalistic economy’, capable of efficient reproduction and delivered from the rentiers’ appropriation of a share of the social surplus. Faithful in this respect to Keynes’s own formulation in the General Theory, Napoleoni stressed, against the post-Keynesian perspectives defended, among the others, by Graziani, the existence of a distributive constraint at full employment and the possibility for workers to affect, at that point, their real wages, thereby impacting the level of employment and the rate of accumulation. The last part of the article will be dedicated to Napoleoni’s convergence, after he had given up the attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s theory of value, to the emancipatory perspective depicted in the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.