SOURCE: "Keynes's View of Economics as a Moral Science," in Keynes and Philosophy: Essays on the Origin of Keynes's Thought, edited by Bradley W. Bateman and John B. Davis, Edward Elgar, 1991, pp. 89-103.
In the following excerpt, Davis discusses Keynes's understanding of economic method in terms of his philosophical beliefs, focusing on his conception of economics as a moral science and his emphasis on the role of individual value judgments in the construction of economic models. J. M. Keynes's theoretical understanding of economic method is one of the less well understood dimensions of his thought, both because Keynes's thinking, unlike that of most economists, was motivated by serious reflection on philosophical questions, and because Keynes's particular philosophical heritage—rooted as it was in early reflections on the philosopher G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica—was quite different from that of other Cambridge economists. Accordingly, although Keynes repeated the Cambridge view that economics is 'essentially a moral science and not a natural science' [The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, (hereafter referred to as CW), 7, Vol. XIV, p. 297], that his own understanding of this notion and the method of economics had its origins in Keynes's own distinctive philosophical development perhaps suggests that Keynes transformed the Cambridge understanding of economic method, much as he transformed its conception of the economy.
This is a free excerpt of 216 words. There are 5,692 words (approx.
19 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our John Maynard Keynes: Critical Essay by J. B. Davis Access Pass.
