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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:19 2006 |
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----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
Pat writes:
>>it should be noted that the Hayek-Keynes debates were about
Keynes's book on money, not his General Theory, and that Keynes
claimed after the debates that he had changed many of the views
expressed in the Money book anyway. So there was no Hayek- Keynes
debate about the General Theory.<<
Hayek provided fundamental arguments against _The General Theory_
in his _The Pure Theory of Capital_. Also, at a fundamental level,
Hayek's articles "Economics and Knowledge", "Scientism and the
Study of Society" and "The Use of Knowledge in Society" were aimed
-- at the most fundamental level -- against the explanatory strategy of
Keynes as much as anything. (As I suggested in an earlier post).
Hayek continued to write against the Keynes of _The General Theory_
for the next 50 years.
In any case, the notion of a Hayek-Keynes 'debate' is deeply
misleading. Hayek engaged Keynes -- and offered arguments and
reasons in favor of his own explanatory strategy & against Keynes'
own -- but Keynes himself merely tossed witty insults at Hayek, and for
all intents and purposes failed to engage Hayek's work. The remarks
Keynes directed at Hayek didn't show deep familiarity with that work &
basically failed to provide reasoned arguments which might count
against it. One might like to think that Keynes' insults contain
'arguments' against Hayek within them, yet to Hayek these could only
be more evidence Keynes had little familiarity with the material
involved. One example here would be the clever insult Keynes used to
attack the logic of valuation across time contained within Bohm-
Bawerk's writings. The insult shows a failure to understand this logic,
rather than a logical problem within it. I've never found much evidence
that Keynes ever attempted to comprehend Hayek's economics.
Keynes knew enough to know that Hayek's economics was something
different from the economics that Keynes disparaged as 'classical'
economics -- but that is the extent of it, as far as I've been able to
determine. I'd be interested to know if anyone has evidence that Keynes
read any of Hayek's major works. There is evidence that Keynes' read
a couple of Hayek's articles on one matter or another. But this
scattered reading could not have let Keynes in on what Hayek was
doing. Did Keynes keep a record of his reading?
Greg Ransom
MiraCosta College
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