ABSTRACT
John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge on 5 June 1883.1 His father, John Neville, was an academic there and taught logic and political economy. He was also the author of one of the first books devoted to the methodology of economics, a volume which remains an important reference and a useful synthesis. By trying to define a median path between political economy conceived as a ‘positive, abstract and deductive science’ and his own vision based on an ‘ethical, realistic, and inductive method’,2 John Neville Keynes expressed the distinction between positive and normative science, in terms still referred to by Milton Friedman at the beginning of his well known text on ‘The Methodology of Positive Economies’ (Friedman 1953). He was a conservative, adhering, like his friend Alfred Marshall, to the ideals of Victorian England.3 John Maynard, who early revealed exceptional intellectual faculties, soon departed from these ideals, especially under the intellectual influence of the milieux in which he was educated: first Eton (1897-1902) and then Cambridge (1902-6).
