I find contributions like the Dimand and Hagemann's edited volume 
fascinating.  That's why I bought in 2009 at a HES meeting (Denver, Co) 
the Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman edited volume, _The Cambridge 
Companion to Keynes_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006).  The 
contributions help me to understand why some otherwise serious scholars 
in the field of the history of economic thought can still be Keynesians, 
even though it is quite glaring to me that Keynes seriously 
misrepresented classical economic concepts and arguments.  Several 
reviewers of Keynes's _General Theory_, including Jacob Viner (1936), 
Frank Knight (1937), and Dennis Robertson (1937), said as much. Keynes 
(1937) himself admitted, "The clue to the peculiarity of my new doctrine 
is to be found in my definitions of Income, Saving, Investment and such 
terms."  My _Macroeconomics without the Errors of Keynes_ (Routledge, 
2019) includes comments on the failures of contributors to recognize 
this aspect Keynes's macroeconomics, including those of Backhouse and 
Bateman, David Laidler, Axel Leijonhufvud, and Kevin Hoover, in the 
_Cambridge Companion_.  Like medical doctors, I believe the path to a 
successful cure is understanding the nature of the problem (disease).

My understanding, from reading the contributions on the Keynes episode, 
is that they are mostly telling the story of how the Keynesian 
revolution happened.  There is little attempt seriously to evaluate 
Keynes's arguments in contradiction to classical analysis.  If they did, 
there would be few Keynesian left, except those who wish to invoke his 
authority behind their preference for state redistribution of income to 
spur consumption by low income earners.  Even in that effort, they fail 
to understand Smith's explanation, "What is annually saved is as 
regularly consumed as what is annually spent, and nearly at the same 
time too; but it is consumed by a different set of people" (_WN_, 1: 
359).  They also must not have understood John Stuart Mill's 
observation, "To the vulgar, it is not at all apparent that what is 
saved is consumed.  To them, every one who saves, appears in the light 
of a person who hoards ... they have no conception of [saving] as doing 
good to other people: saving is to them another word for keeping a thing 
to oneself" (_Works_, 2: 70-1).  It is also remarkable to me how little 
attention these contributors have paid to Keynes's retractions of his 
criticism of classical (Smith's) arguments in his 1946 article, 
including his seeking "not to defeat, but to implement the wisdom of 
Adam Smith" (p. 186).

I look forward to reading _The Edward Elgar Companion to John Maynard 
Keynes_.  I may have something to say about the contributions in my 
forthcoming, "Macroeconomic Analysis in the Classical Tradition: The 
Impediments of Keynes's Influence."

James Ahiakpor

Steve Kates wrote:
>
> I hear all the time that Keynesian economics has been transcended, 
> that it is a thing of the past, but the evidence, both from the way 
> our textbooks are written and in the way policy is conducted across 
> the world, is that the very core of macro theory and policy remains 
> Y=C+I+G. I am in no doubt that this collection is indeed a valuable 
> collection in that it consolidates a great deal of writing on 
> Keynesian economics and its history into a single volume. Yet the 
> issue for me remains, that economists continue to trundle down this 
> Keynesian path without the slightest evidence that it accurately 
> explains how economies work, or that there has ever been a single 
> instance where a Keynesian fiscal expansion has actually succeeded in 
> bringing an economy out of recession and restoring full employment. 
> You might have hoped that the failure of every stimulus in the world 
> to succeed following the GFC might have created some kind of learning 
> experience, but so far there is little evidence that economists are 
> even beginning to rethink these macro models. Since the bibliography 
> includes G.C. Peden, I will add in my favourite quotation from his 
> writings, and leave it at that. And what this quote shows is that it's 
> not as if pubic spending didn't have a constituency before Keynes, and 
> yet, when it was tried, it turns out that the "Treasury View" was 
> absolutely correct, as it has been every time a "fiscal stimulus" has 
> been tried. Winston Churchill was the British Chancellor of the 
> Exchequer and this is from 1929, from well before the stock market 
> crash in October.
>
>     “Churchill pointed to recent government expenditure on public
>     works such as housing, roads, telephones, electricity supply, and
>     agricultural development, and concluded that, although expenditure
>     for these purposes had been justified:
>
>         ‘For the purposes of curing unemployment the results have
>         certainly been disappointing. They are, in fact, so meagre as
>         to lend considerable colour to the orthodox Treasury doctrine
>         which has been steadfastly held that, whatever might be the
>         political or social advantages, very little additional
>         employment and no permanent additional employment can in fact
>         and as a general rule be created by State borrowing and State
>         expenditure.’” (Peden 1996: 69-70)
>
> I just wonder whether this volume has an entry on Critics of Keynesian 
> Economics. I doubt that it does, but in any case it would undoubtedly 
> and unfortunately have to be a very short entry.
>
> On Sun, Mar 1, 2020 at 5:48 PM Humberto Barreto <[log in to unmask] 
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>
>     Published by EH.Net (February 2020)
>
>     Robert W. Dimand and Harald Hagemann, editors, /The Elgar
>     Companion to John Maynard Keynes./ Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar,
>     2019. xxi + 648 pp. $250 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-84720-008-2.
>
>     Reviewed for EH.Net by Bradley W. Bateman, Randolph College.
>
>
>     Rarely does one read a reference work for pleasure. After all,
>     would you take the /Encyclopedia Britannica/ or the /New
>     Palgrave/ to the beach for your holiday? Not likely. And yet,
>     there are reference books that one not only depends on, but
>     enjoys. These might be surveys of the literature such as G.C.
>     Peden’s little gem, /Keynes, the Treasury, and British Economic
>     Policy/ (1988); or they might be traditional multi-volume works
>     like the /Dictionary of National Biography/. A good reference work
>     can take many forms; but when you find a well-written and
>     authoritative work that can help you in your research, you turn to
>     it regularly and, yes, can even come to enjoy it.
>
>     If you have a shelf of books like this, you may want to add to it
>     /The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes/, edited by Robert
>     Dimand (Brock University) and Harald Hagemann (University of
>     Hohenheim). Dimand and Hagemann, two top historians of economics,
>     have put together a comprehensive, one volume reference book on
>     John Maynard Keynes. The Companion covers everything from Keynes’s
>     parents to New Keynesian macroeconomics. And while there is a fair
>     representation of young scholars among the contributors, the vast
>     majority of the entries are written by well-established experts:
>     John Davis on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heinz Kurz on Piero Sraffa,
>     Susan Howson on James Meade, and Bruce Littleboy on G.L.S.
>     Shackle. The essays on Keynes’s great trilogy are, likewise,
>     written by experts: Robert Dimand on /A Tract on Monetary Reform/,
>     Ingo Barens on /A Treatise on Money/, and Robert Skidelsky on /The
>     General Theory/.
>
>     Four of the best entries in the book are by D.E. Moggridge, the
>     editor of Keynes’s /Collected Writings/. Moggridge is also an
>     eminent economic historian and he is thus able to set the context
>     authoritatively for Keynes’s work in his four essays: The India
>     Office, World War I, Keynes and British financial policy in the
>     inter-war years, and World War II. Keynes was, of course, deeply
>     entwined in the debates about economic policy during his lifetime
>     and Moggridge beautifully lays out the twists and turns in his career.
>
>     The /Companion/ also contains unexpected gems such as Sherry Davis
>     Kasper on “The End of Laissez-Faire” and Robert Dimand’s entry on
>     Mabel Timlin.
>
>     The only uneven section of the /Companion/ is the final one,
>     Keynesianism in Various Countries. Many of the essays here are
>     excellent and build on the literature in this field. For instance,
>     the essay on Japan by Masazumi Wakatabe takes the reader far
>     beyond the indeterminate conclusions of Eleanor Hadley (1989).
>     Likewise, Piero Bini’s entry on Italy expands nicely upon the
>     classic essay by Marcello de Cecco (1989). Harald Hagemann’s entry
>     on Germany, Goulven Rubin’s on France, and Robert Dimand’s on
>     Canada are indispensable for scholars who study how Keynes’s ideas
>     were (or were not) spread in various countries. There is new
>     material here for even the most seasoned scholar. These essays are
>     definitive surveys of the literature.
>
>     But against these many excellent country studies are two that take
>     a quite different tack: Geoff Tily on the U.K. and Mathew
>     Forstater on the U.S.
>
>     In the case of the United States, the standard narrative in the
>     literature lays out how countercyclical fiscal policy first came
>     to be implemented in 1938 without any reference whatsoever to
>     Keynes or /The General Theory/ (Stein 1969, Backhouse and Bateman
>     2011). Forstater mentions none of this history and chooses instead
>     to focus more on analytical debates about the evolution of the
>     Keynesian model in the U.S. There is nothing wrong with this, per
>     se, and eventually the Keynesian model(s) did become central to
>     policy debate in the United States. But it is an unorthodox take
>     on the history of “Keynesianism” in the U.S. since, in fact,
>     Keynes is not present at the moment when many people assume he was
>     taking center stage.
>
>     The question of Keynes’s role in the development of British
>     economic policy is much larger, however, than the question of his
>     role in the States. He was, after all, British and his central
>     role in British economic policy debates shaped not only his own
>     thinking but the course of his nation’s history. There is a huge
>     literature in economic history on the question of Keynes’s
>     influence in British policy making (Peden 1988, Peden 2005) and
>     leading British historians have weighed in on the question of his
>     influence(s) (e.g. Clarke 1988). However, none of that debate is
>     even mentioned in Tily’s entry. Instead, he depends on tables of
>     government expenditure and deficits and argues from these for the
>     centrality of Keynes’s vision to 1930s British policy making (p.
>     570). His revisionist approach is certainly a legitimate method
>     and Tily highlights several important facts about Keynes’s
>     thinking that are often overlooked, such as Keynes’s preference
>     for low interest rates over fiscal deficits; but as his results
>     about Keynes’s success in the policy sphere differ quite notably
>     from those in a well-established literature, he owes it to his
>     reader to explain the differences. The method of argument is not
>     necessarily wrong, but it is certainly incomplete.
>
>     By far, however, most entries in this /Companion/ are
>     authoritative, well-written, and useful. For instance, the pieces
>     on Don Patinkin (Goulven Rubin), Axel Leijonhuvud (Hans-Michael
>     Trautwein), and Hyman Minsky (L. Randall Wray) tell a compelling
>     history of how Keynes’s ideas were extended and reshaped by
>     others. They limn otherwise fading chapters in the history of
>     twentieth century macroeconomics.
>
>     One might suppose that the likelihood of wanting to have this
>     excellent reference volume in one’s library would depend on one’s
>     proclivities in political economy: Free marketeers would not want
>     it, while interventionists would. And that may be true for many
>     historians of economics. But regardless of one’s own political
>     economy it is a valuable tool and it should absolutely be in all
>     university libraries where it will serve well the interests of all
>     curious students of the discipline.
>
>     References
>
>     Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman. 2011. /Capitalist
>     Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes./ Cambridge: Harvard University
>     Press.
>
>     Peter Clarke. 1989. /The Keynesian Revolution in the Making,
>     1924-1936/. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>
>     Marcello DeCecco. 1989. “Keynes and Italian Economics,” in Peter
>     Hall, ed. /The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism
>     across Nations/. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
>
>     Eleanor Hadley. 1989. “The Diffusion of Keynesian Ideas in Japan,”
>     in Peter Hall, ed. /The Political Power of Economic Ideas:
>     Keynesianism across Nations/. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
>
>     G.C. Peden. 1988. /Keynes, the Treasury, and British Economic
>     Policy/. London: Macmillan.
>
>     G.C. Peden. 2005. /Keynes and His Critics: Treasury Responses to
>     the Keynesian Revolution, 1925-1946./ London: British Academy.
>
>     Herbert Stein. 1969. /The Fiscal Revolution/. Chicago: University
>     of Chicago Press.
>
>
>     Bradley W. Bateman is Professor of Economics and President of
>     Randolph College. He is the author of /Keynes’s Uncertain
>     Revolution/ (1996) and is most recently a co-editor of /Liberalism
>     and the Welfare State: Economists and Arguments for the Welfare
>     State/ (2017).
>
>     Copyright (c) 2020 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may
>     be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is
>     given to the author and the list. For other permission, please
>     contact the EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]
>     <mailto:[log in to unmask]>). Published by EH.Net (February
>     2020). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
>     http://www.eh.net/BookReview.
>


-- 
James C.W. Ahiakpor, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Economics
California State University, East Bay
Hayward, CA 94542
510-885-3137
510-885-7175 (Fax; Not Private)