"Keynes was in his most lucid and persuasive mood; and the effect was irresistible. At such moments, I often find myself thinking that Keynes must be one of the most remarkable men that ever lived -- the quick logic, the birdlike swoop of intuition, the vivid fancy, the wide vision, above all the incomparable sense of the fitness of words, all combine to make something several degrees beyond the limit of ordinary human achievement.
He uses the classical style of our life and language, it is true, but it is shot through with something which is not traditional, a unique unearthly quality of which one can only say that it is pure genius."
Quoted from Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Freedom, 1937-1946 (New York: Viking, 2001).
Lord Lionel C. Robbins (1898-1984) was a well-known British economist at the London School of Economics from the '30s into the '80s. Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky (1939-) is a British economist of Russian origin and the author of major biographies of John Maynard Keynes.
Strongly Neo-classical in his orientation, Robbins was nonetheless unlike his contemporaries in the sense that he was not a Marshallian, the dominant British school of thought at the time. Rather, he was steeped in continental thinking and trained his students in that orientation. In this regard, he was instrumental in widening Anglo-Saxon economics to consider other schools of thought.
The Keynes in the quote above, of course, is John Maynard Keynes, originator of Keynesianism, the dominant school of economic thought in the United States and much of Europe in the immediate post-war decades. It is only in recent decades that Keynesianism as a focus of policy has begun to fade.
Initially, Lord Robbins was opposed to Keynes and Keynesianism, but eventually accepted many of its essential elements, if with much criticism. He is now best known for his early work on economic methodology and later writings on the history of economic thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment