I'm with Pat on this:

I almost said in my earlier post that for Keynes, action that is not
knowledge-based is not human action.I would have used the notion of "animal
spirits" as evidence of this claim. For Knight (and I guess, from Pat's
comments, for Cantillon and the Austrians), their view of human action does
not bear the same relation to knowledge as Keynes' does.

Ross Emmett


Excerpt from Pat Gunning's message:

The question you raise, as I understand it, concerns the role of animal
spirits in a theory of market action. Perhaps the reason that Austrians
don't like animal spirits is that they are irrelevant to the broader problem
of building a theory of market interaction based on the assumption that
individuals act. The idea that individuals act implies that their behavior
is not ruled or even guided by animal spirits. It does not deny that part of
their behavior may be determined by this. But behavior is not action. One
may object to a theory of action, but that is not what you are doing. Nor
did Keynes state such an objection.

Let me say this in a different way. Crusoe's behavior in any particular case
might be best explained by referring to "animal spirits." But no reasonable
person would suggest this assumption as a paradigm for building a theory of
Crusoe as a distinctly human actor.