ABSTRACT
As our current understanding of the working of the economy is far better than Keynes’s, ‘if New Keynesian economics is not a true representation of Keynes’s view, then so much the worse for Keynes’ (Mankiw 1992: 561). While this muchquoted statement of Mankiw’s can barely be called into question, it remains that establishing whether New Keynesian economics (from here on NKE) will reflect fresh credit on a non-neoclassical view of economic activity (despite its departures from Keynes’s thought) is a not unimportant undertaking. For this reason, following a cursory analysis of Keynes’s place within economic theory we wish to point out if and how NKE can provide fresh scope for a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. However, as Keynes’s services to economic theory are many and ‘New Keynesian economists are an extremely heterogeneous group’ (see Snowdon et al. 1994: 289; also Nisticò and D’Orlando 1995, 1998), before we can deny or endorse the Keynesian nature of NKE we will have to single out Keynes’s main contribution to economic thought and the characteristics that writings by NKE theorists have in common.
