ABSTRACT
It has increasingly been recognized in recent years that Keynes’s work cannot properly be appreciated if he is regarded narrowly as “an economist.” Indeed an expertise in current economics may be misleading rather than enlightening. A distinction (though not always the same distinction) is now customarily drawn between Keynesianism, as a technical, professional, conventional doctrine or practice, and the thought of the historical Keynes. Keynes himself talked of his mature theoretical insights, for which he made such notoriously high claims, as simple, basic ideas. He went so far on one occasion as to claim that, while what he had to say was “intrinsically easy,” it was “only to an audience of economists that it is difficult.”1 This reflected a longstanding belief that economics was “an easy subject-at which, however, very few excel!” The paradox was that the avocation of the economist required a combination of gifts: not only as mathematician and historian, but also as statesman and philosopher.2 This paper explores the relation between these two latter rolesthe one pre-eminently concerned with politics and public duty, the other intractably preoccupied with the foundations of personal morality.
