ABSTRACT
More than three decades ago Clower and Leijonhufvud (1975) wrote a joint paper to address the central message of Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). They start the paper by complaining about the infinite regress on the meaning of the work of Keynes. They maintain that the debate on what Keynes meant will never be settled, though no explanation is provided for their view,1 and they prefer instead to take a critical look at the main features of a typical Keynesian model. But then, with considerable candour, they acknowledge that the state of affairs from this perspective is no more comforting. To state the case succinctly, Clower and Leijonhufvud argue that the typical Keynesian model, such as the IS-LM model, imposes virtually no analytical discipline upon its users (Clower and Leijonhufvud 1975: 182). They speculate that addressing the way individual economic agents co-ordinate production, consumption and trading activities is a possible way to impose some useful constraints upon the construction of a Keynesian model.
