Victoria Chick wrote:

"Roy Weintraub and Robert Leeson suggest that Keynes was the chief 
promoter of the idea that he was the first economist against laissez 
faire, but they surely can't suppose that he was unaware of the 
widespread support of his 'classical' contemporaries for public works in 
the Depression. For example, speaking of Pigou and Robertson he wrote 
(to Kahn, 10 Oct 1937) : '... when it comes to practice, there is really 
extremely little between us. Why do they then insist on maintaining 
theories from which their own practical conclusions cannot possibly 
follow?' (CW XIV, p 259). See Also CW XIII, 495ff. (Thanks to Geoff Tily 
for finding the quote for me.)"


This is a strange posting, since not only did I not say what Chick 
accuses me of "suggesting" or "supposing", but I have written exactly 
the opposite, most recently (2005) in HOPE (37.1: 133-155):

"What we have is Harrod, and the other Oxford signatories, none of them 
part of the Cambridge Circus, urging Keynesian policies prior to the 
theorization of those policies in a full-blown fashion in Keynes' 
just-being-created /General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money/. 
This provides more evidence for the now standard view that there was a 
large literature advocating public works in the mid-1920s to mid-1930s, 
a literature that used arguments quite different from the ones Keynes 
put forth in his 1936 book (e.g. Hutchison 1968; Davis 1971; Howson and 
Winch 1977). We now understand that the solution to the depression was 
not simply Keynes', nor was it a result of Keynes' theory, but rather 
that Keynes' theory emerged as the unifying glue to what had been 
emerging as a policy consensus."

Is it that Americans and Australians must not tread on Keynes?

E. Roy Weintraub