On convention: Keynes, Lewis and the French School

The purpose of this chapter is to explore Keynes’s later remarks on the nature of social conventions, and to consider how these relate to the widely accepted notion of convention proposed by the philosopher David Lewis (1969). We shall address the latter issue via the work of an important representative of the Économie des conventions in France (Dupuy 1989a), whose work draws on both Keynes and Lewis.1