On Some Dissenting Views: “Post-Keynesians” and Hyman Minsky

The various oppositions to Keynes surveyed in the previous chapters—the Monetarists, the Austrians and the New Classical macroeconomists—encountered criticisms from his supporters. That group of authors, mostly known as ‘post-Keynesian’ economists (although some were not identified as such), raised a wide range of ideas that were in line, in their opinion, with the principles Keynes promoted in the General Theory. Naturally, these scholars’ writings were focused on Keynes, on the one hand, and the various tendencies opposing Keynes’s ideas as they were emerging over the years, on the other hand. Moreover, the dissent of the post-Keynesians had started earlier, immediately after 1936 and throughout the 1950s, when they distanced themselves from IS-LM Keynesianism while that tendency was on its way to a hegemonic position in the discipline. The better known and recognized leaders of this tendency from the 1950s through the 1970s were scholars like Sidney Weintraub and later Paul Davidson who promoted post-Keynesianism in the United States. Their work was shaped both as an opposition to IS-LM and to Monetarism, while in later years their views put them in direct conflict with the rising ideas of the various New Classical macroeconomic tendencies. A unique independent scholar, Hyman Minsky, famous for his ‘financial instability hypothesis,’ became an influential and important voice among the dissenters.