ABSTRACT
This paper examines the views of John Maynard Keynes on socio-economic classes and their relations to his theory of involuntary unemployment. Although Keynes did not provide a rigorous or systematic theory of socioeconomic classes in the manner of, say, Karl Marx, his understanding and interpretation of class relations in twentieth-century capitalism was integral to what Schumpeter (1954, 195) aptly calls the pre-analytic “vision” which undergirded his economic analysis. Because Keynes’ theoretical conceptualizations were substantially motivated by his policy positions, his underlying views on the changing institutional and class structure of modern economic society are more important and have greater implications for his economic theory than might well otherwise be the case.
