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Was Keynes Kuhnian? Keynes and the Idea of Theoretical Revolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

David Wayne Parsons
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Extract

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 1985 , pp. 451 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

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2 Interpretations of the revolution have been examined from the Kuhnian point of view, cf., for example, Stanfield, R., ‘Kuhnian Scientific Revolutions and the Keynesian Revolution’, Journal of Economic Issues, VIII (1974), 97–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but not, as the author is aware, from the perspective of Keynes's general concept of theoretical change.

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34 See, for example, his argument in Chapter 16 of the General Theory, that it is not ‘reasonable … that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on …. fortuitous and often wasteful mitigators when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends’ (General Theory, p. 220, my emphasis).Google Scholar

35 Cf. his comments in ‘The Great Villiers Connection’, Essays in Biography; pp. 60–1Google Scholar, where he notes the importance of blood relations in the ruling classes of England. Small ‘connections’ have produced, he argues, ‘eminent characters out of all proportion to their size’.

36 Keynes, , The Collected Writings, IXGoogle Scholar, Essays in Persuasion, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ (1928), p. 332.Google Scholar