Degrees of Comment on Keynes on Uncertainty: Review Article on Keynes on Uncertainty and Tragic Happiness: Complexity and Expectations by Anna M. Carabelli

J Gay Meeks

Contributions to Political Economy, 2023, vol. 42, issue 1, 6-26

Abstract: Oscar Wilde suggests that a book on which critics are agreed must be a ‘very obvious and shallow production’. This review article on Anna Carabelli’s 2021 book (a volume which helpfully draws together the fruits of her more than forty years’ research into Keynes’s method and ways of thought) involves five books that seem to invite the critical dissent that Wilde would have applauded. In her book, Carabelli displays her customary scholarship in writing about Keynes himself but is briskly dismissive of almost all commentators on his treatment of uncertainty and method. In what may be termed a fourth degree of comment - commenting on her comments on others’ comments on Keynes - I take issue with some of her attacks, especially over the extent to which Keynes regarded convention as a stabilising factor and over whether Keynes is misinterpreted by ‘followers of Hume’. A puzzle Carabelli seems to miss concerns which Hume is leading these ‘followers’ – in terms of current controversy, the ‘old’, the ‘new’ or perhaps yet another Hume. The nature of Hume’s own response to his famous sceptical challenge to inductive reasoning is in dispute, and it is contentious which of his two major works better shows this. Also subject to fierce debate is the relation of the philosophy in Keynes’s 1921 Treatise on Probability to the economics in his 1936 General Theory. Carabelli’s detailed history of thought perspective on how Keynes’s ideas grew encounters both rival historical slants and comment from a more purely analytical angle.

Date: 2023
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