ABSTRACT
The importance of the theme of uncertainty in Keynes’s writings has long been recognised by what Coddington (1976) called his ‘fundamentalist’ followers. Two early exponents of the centrality of uncertainty to Keynes’s thought are Robinson (1964) and Shackle (1967). Both argued that Keynes rejected the probability calculus as a means of understanding economic behaviour under conditions of uncertainty, citing as the two key pieces of textual evidence Chapter 12 in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (CWVII) and his 1937 Quarterly Journal of Economics article (CWXIVa). However, Shackle and Robinson and other early Keynesian fundamentalists tended to present Keynes’s arguments as largely negative, destructive of mainstream theorising. Keynes was not interpreted as offering a constructive alternative approach to developing a theory of economic behaviour under uncertainty.
