Platonic Forms

We already noted that Keynes was a philosopher mainly in the sense of a man reflecting on the events of life. He was certainly not an academic philosopher. Beyond his youthful dissertation, his writings show almost no interest in traditional philosophical questions, and Cambridge philosophy, in any case, was taking a turn distinctly opposite to Keynes’s outlook and interests, a positivist turn. The baffling and unrealistic conclusions of classical economics should have encouraged his epistemological interests, but we have to wait till the accident of the League of Nations asking him to review some work by Tinbergen (1938) before he will give sustained thought to the peculiar method of economics. Before then his criticism of economic method, in works like The End of Laissez-Faire (1926), was mostly political and ideological rather than strictly philosophical. Neither Robbins’ Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932), nor T. W. Hutchison’s reply, Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) elicited his interest, and they, in turn, ignored Keynes’s work and distinctive method.