Keynes Revisited

There are many bonds which, I feel, connect me with Professor David McCord Wright—quite beside the fact that we are both afflicted with the same physical handicap of being hard of hearing (this, by the way, seems to be unusually common among contemporary economists and itself deserves a penetrating sociological analysis). I have always been very sympathetic to his personality and to his scientific work, and I am happy to know that he reciprocates my feelings. If I am not mistaken, he belongs, broadly speaking, to my own generation of economists, men who learnt their trade in the intellectual climate of the pre-Keynesian age and then felt compelled to adjust their fundamental outlook on economic problems both to the experience of the Great Depression and to its interpretation by Keynes.

All this is reason enough why I have read with the utmost interest the collection of lectures which Professor Wright has now published under the title The Keynesian System. My first reaction is great admiration for his success in bringing into this exploration of the Keynesian and post-Keynesian maze as much order and clarity as is possible. With a patience which, I fear, I would be sadly lacking in such a case, with all the gifts of a great teacher, with an exemplary degree of intellectual probity, and with an enviable combination of lucidity and suggestiveness which does not involve any sacrifice of scientific rigor, Professor Wright achieves the tour de force of making Keynes’ General Theory of Employment seem to be a book whose main ideas can be grasped without desperate effort. Anyone who knows that it is, in fact, one of the most abstruse and worst-organized books in economics will fully appreciate this achievement. We may wonder whether this didactic effort did not need, besides the other virtues already mentioned, a good measure also of simple charity and generosity, which very often gives Keynes the benefit of the doubt—if it does not even, at times, resolve Keynesian inconsistencies into McCord Wrightian syllogisms. There may also be readers who will wonder whether there is not some ominous significance in the fact that Keynes, who is generally considered a master of English prose, seems to have lost his grip when trying to make articulate the ideas of his magnum opus.

WR

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Wilhelm Roepke

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There are many bonds which, I feel, connect me with Professor David McCord Wright—quite beside the fact that we are both afflicted with the same physical handicap of being hard of hearing (this, by the way, seems to be unusually common among contemporary economists and itself deserves a penetrating sociological analysis). I have always been very sympathetic to his personality and to his scientific work, and I am happy to know that he reciprocates my feelings. If I am not mistaken, he belongs, broadly speaking, to my own generation of economists, men who learnt their trade in the intellectual climate of the pre-Keynesian age and then felt compelled to adjust their fundamental outlook on economic problems both to the experience of the Great Depression and to its interpretation by Keynes.

All this is reason enough why I have read with the utmost interest the collection of lectures which Professor Wright has now published under the title The Keynesian System. My first reaction is great admiration for his success in bringing into this exploration of the Keynesian and post-Keynesian maze as much order and clarity as is possible. With a patience which, I fear, I would be sadly lacking in such a case, with all the gifts of a great teacher, with an exemplary degree of intellectual probity, and with an enviable combination of lucidity and suggestiveness which does not involve any sacrifice of scientific rigor, Professor Wright achieves the tour de force of making Keynes’ General Theory of Employment seem to be a book whose main ideas can be grasped without desperate effort. Anyone who knows that it is, in fact, one of the most abstruse and worst-organized books in economics will fully appreciate this achievement. We may wonder whether this didactic effort did not need, besides the other virtues already mentioned, a good measure also of simple charity and generosity, which very often gives Keynes the benefit of the doubt—if it does not even, at times, resolve Keynesian inconsistencies into McCord Wrightian syllogisms. There may also be readers who will wonder whether there is not some ominous significance in the fact that Keynes, who is generally considered a master of English prose, seems to have lost his grip when trying to make articulate the ideas of his magnum opus.