ABSTRACT
Of all the economists in John Maynard Keynes’s circle, Richard Kahn was perhaps closer to him than any other when he was working on the General Theory. However, the precise contribution he made to the development of the ideas that were to become the General Theory is still much debated. On the one hand we have Donald Moggridge (1994, 109; 1992, 532 n), who argues that in subsequent reconstructions Kahn credited himself and the ‘Circus’ with a decisive role in the evolution of Keynes’s theory, although the writings offer no evidence or documentation to support the claim. On the other hand we have Joseph Schumpeter (1954, 1172), who saw the collaboration with Kahn as something very close to ‘co-authorship,’ while Roy Harrod (1951, 451) described Kahn as Keynes’s ‘main pillar support’ in the work on the book. Most interpretations have tended to place considerable stress on the difficulty of assessing the exact nature of the collaboration between Keynes and Kahn. ‘Kahn’s role has provoked intermittent speculation,’ writes Peter Clarke (1988, 249). Robert Skidelsky (1992, 449) observes that ‘the nature of Kahn’s contribution to Keynes’s thinking is much disputed.’ And Don Patinkin (1993, 652 n. 5) refers to ‘the perennial question of Richard Kahn’s role in the writing of the General Theory.’ In this essay I take a new look at the question in light of the correspondence between Keynes and Kahn, with the aim expressed in the title of this article: to read the transition from the Treatise to the General Theory as a history of collaboration.1
