Keynes The Man by Murray N. Rothbard

Author:Murray N. Rothbard [Murray N. Rothbard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-93355-072-5
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2007-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

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9 Harry Johnson put the strategy perceptively: “In this process, it helps greatly to give old concepts new and confusing names.… [T]he new theory had to have the appropriate degree of difficulty to understand. This is a complex problem in the design of new theories. The new theory had to be so difficult to understand that senior academic colleagues would find it neither easy nor worthwhile to study, so that they would waste their efforts on peripheral theoretical issues, and so offer themselves as easy market for criticism and dismissal by their younger and hungrier colleagues. At the same time, the new theory had to appear both difficult enough to challenge the intellectual interest of young colleagues and students, but actually easy enough for them to master adequately with a sufficient investment of intellectual endeavor. These objectives Keynes’s General Theory managed to achieve: it neatly shelves the old and established scholars, like Pigou and Robertson, enabled the most enterprising middle-and lower-middle-aged like Hansen, Hicks, and Joan Robinson to jump on and drive the bandwagon, and permitted a whole generation of students… to escape from the slow and soul-destroying process of acquiring wisdom by osmosis from their elders and the literature into an intellectual realm in which youthful iconoclasm could quickly earn its just reward (in its own eyes at least) by the demolition of the intellectual pretensions of its academic seniors and predecessors. Economics, delightfully, could be reconstructed from scratch on the basis of a little Keynesian understanding and a lofty contempt for the existing literature—and so it was” (1978, pp. 188–89)

10 Robbins biographer, D.P. O’Brien, labors hard to maintain that, despite what he admits is Robbins’s “elaborate” and “exaggerated contrition,” Robbins never really, deep down, converted to Keynesianism. But O’Brien is unconvincing, even after he tries to show how Robbins waffled on some issues. Moreover, O’Brien admits that Robbins dropped his Misesian macro approach, and he fails to mention Robbins’s astonishing treatment of Keynes as “godlike” (O’Brien 1988, pp. 14–16, 117–20).

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