ABSTRACT
On the occasion of the first annual Hicks Lecture, Solow informed the audience that for many young scholars Hicks is merely a great name, a past master of the economics discipline (Solow 1984: 13). Hicks is the author of ‘A suggestion for simplifying the theory of money’ (1935), Value and Capital (1939) and, between these works, ‘Mr Keynes and the “Classics”’ (1937) that led to the creation of the typical Keynesian IS-LM model, mentioned in Chapter 3. Solow called this young Hicks ‘J.R.’. However, he said, there is also another Hicks, Sir John (see, on that distinction, Hicks himself, 1975: 36, Harcourt 1975: 368 and also Collard 1993: 332). This mature Hicks is the author of a rather long list of critical writings on contemporary economics, to which J.R. himself had greatly contributed. To mention but a few books, Sir John was the author of Critical Essays in Monetary Theory (1967), The Crisis in Keynesian Economics (1974), Causality in Economics (1979) and A Market Theory of Money (1989). The plea of Solow to young scholars is that Hicks’s writings have continual relevance. In particular, Solow argues that modern generations of economists can learn important lessons not only from the early Hicks, i.e. J.R.’s writings, but also from the later and more critical Hicks, i.e. Sir John’s writings. This chapter responds to Solow’s plea by showing that some of the writings of J.R. and Sir John can be used to shed light on key issues discussed in the previous chapters, and in this way they give further strength to the main proposition of this book, namely that Keynesian economics, broadly defined as the economic approach that finds inspiration in Keynes’s work, remains a driving force in the development of new theories and methods of analysis (see, on this point, Hicks himself, 1980).
