The relationship between Keynes’s early and later philosophical thinking

The relationship between Keynes’s early and later thinking in general is a large subject that covers the domains of economics, philosophy, probability, politics and ethics. In this chapter I restrict myself to philosophy, comparing Keynes’s early and later philosophical thinking. Admittedly, it is not entirely possible to discuss Keynes’s thinking in only one domain at a time. But because philosophy involves foundational conceptual structures, it can be discussed in relative separation from these other domains. This chapter thus advances one view of Keynes’s philosophical development, and then briefly considers some of the implications of this view for his later economics.