Keynes and Economics: The Early Stage

The following pages offer a contribution to the understanding of Keynes’s débuts as an economist, in the hope we might dissipate a few myths, some created by Keynes himself, others by disciples or adversaries. Following some preliminary remarks on these misunderstandings, we will recall how Keynes became a professional economist, showing that he did not arrive to economics by chance, that this was indeed a natural result of his early preoccupations and thinking. But, even when he was a confirmed economist, economics remained secondary for Keynes, after ethics and politics, and this until the end of his life. We will examine this in part three of this paper, where we consider how Keynes viewed economics in the first decade of our century. We will show that certain important themes in his economic reflections, his view of laissez-faire in particular, are clearly present in early works, and that the methods he would later apply to economic studies were built up at that date. In the last part of this paper, we will turn to Keynes’s early theoretical economics, examining in particular his reflections on the quantity theory of money, in his lectures notes. We will show that his position towards this theory -- at least in its most simplified version -- was already somewhat critical at that early stage, drawing on his philosophical and methodological views.