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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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