On my shelf is a collection of essays published in 1947 in memory of Keynes, who had died the previous year. The book, [amazon_link id=”B000UWHGDM” target=”_blank” ]The New Economics: Keynes’ Influence on Theory and Public Policy[/amazon_link], edited by Seymour Harris, is fascinating for many reasons. Among them, the reverence for Keynes, but also the kind of discussion that took place between economists to determine what ‘Keynesian’ thought was, exactly.

[amazon_image id=”B000UWHGDM” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The New Economics : Keynes Influence on Theory and Public Policy / Edited, with Introductions by Seymour E. Harris[/amazon_image]

The affectionate and respectful chapter written by Joseph Schumpeter also makes some interesting sociological points about ‘Keynesianism’. He writes:

“Many of the men who entered the field of teaching or research in the 20s and 30s had renounced allegiance to the bourgeois scheme of life, the bourgeois scheme of values. Many of them sneered at the profit motive and at the element of personal performance in the capitalist process.”

But they did not want to pronounce themselves socialists, either. So Keynes gave them a ‘respectable’ alternative, a theory that made the personal accumulation of wealth bad for the economy and, as Schumpeter paraphrases [amazon_link id=”1467934925″ target=”_blank” ]The General Theory[/amazon_link], “the unequal distribution of income is the ultimate cause of unemployment.”

[amazon_image id=”1467934925″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money[/amazon_image]

This, Schumpeter concludes, “Is what the Keynesian revolution amounts to.”

It’s quite interesting to reflect in this vein on the sociology of the opposing camps of macroeconomists today, with the New Neo-Keynesians, like Schumpeter’s young economists of the 1930s, similarly crafting a non-socialist but anti-capitalist identity. Scary how many echoes of the 30s there seem to be….

Meanwhile, the opposing shouty camps in macroeconomics are giving the whole subject a wholly undeserved bad name, as Chris Dillow accurately but plaintively points out in an excellent Stumbling and Mumbling post.