ABSTRACT
The concept of convention is the primary philosophical concept of Keynes’s later philosophical thinking. Yet because it emerged in Keynes’s overall thinking more as a product of decisions made regarding nonphilosophical matters, in connection with the problems of argument encountered in the writing of The General Theory in the 1930s, the concept of convention never received the systematic investigation from Keynes that his early philosophical notions had when philosophy and ethics were his chief preoccupation. As a result, because the concept has always been seen as an economic concept-and then with an uncertain pedigree-it has gone unappreciated as a specifically philosophical contribution of The General Theory. The lack of attention the concept of convention received from Keynes may also be due to his being influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thinking about convention. Keynes may have felt that Cambridge was already producing a clear philosophical understanding of the nature of the concept, and that Wittgenstein was better suited to take on primary responsibility in that effort. I explore the connections between Keynes and Wittgenstein in regard to the concept of convention briefly at the end of the discussion below (pp. 218-
21). In any event, whatever the relationship between Keynes and Wittgenstein, Keynes’s failure to take rules and conventions seriously in his early philosophy left him without a clear account of the nature and workings of convention when he turned to the topic in The General Theory and was chiefly concerned with economic argument. In a second edition of the book he might have chosen to amplify those passages where the operation of conventions was central to his argument. But what was ultimately most needed was a careful elaboration of the central ideas he believed were involved in the concept. On account of his early death and the tremendous demands upon his time of policy and economic debate in his last years, this elaboration never occurred. Accordingly, it is necessary to reconstruct how Keynes’s argument and thinking about convention might have proceeded in light of the foundations laid down for the concept in The General Theory.
