 Keynes, Schumpeter, Mercantilism and Liquidity Preference: Some Reflections on How We Do History of Economic ThoughtRichard van den Berg ()
Chapter Chapter 16 in New Perspectives on Political Economy and Its History, 2020, pp 323-342 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract What readers ‘made of’ a text is an object of historical study that is distinct from the ‘original purposes’ that its author may have had. Later commentators will typically bring to bear concerns and perspectives of their own time when interpreting earlier economic writings. Simply condemning such interpretations for being ‘retrospective’ is often too simple. This chapter develops this point by examining Joseph Schumpeter’s willingness to read Keynesian precedents into ‘mercantilist’ monetary writings. It focuses on a single instance in which Schumpeter argued that a passage, which he attributed to the eighteenth-century author Malachy Postlethwayt, ‘reads like’ Keynes’s theory that money interest depends on liquidity preference. It illustrates the historicity of historiography, or how the emergence of new economic theories, like Keynes’s theory of interest as a monetary phenomenon, motivates new readings of old texts. Keywords: Schumpeter; Keynes; Postlethwayt; Forbonnais; Mercantilism; Interest; Hoarding; Liquidity preference (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-030-42925-6_16 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42925-6_16 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought from Palgrave Macmillan |
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