KEYNES, ANIMAL SPIRITS, AND INSTINCT: REASON PLUS INTUITION IS BETTER THAN RATIONAL

Vincent Barnett

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2017, vol. 39, issue 3, 381-399

Abstract: This article investigates John Maynard Keynes’s understanding and use of the concept of ‘animal spirits’ by tracing how he conceived of related ideas such as human nature, instinct, and intuition, and how they connect to the rational economic agent usually assumed by mainstream economic theory. It also considers the notion of Money-of-Account as proposed in A Treatise on Money in relation to the concept of reciprocal altruism as developed in the field of evolutionary biology, and documents Keynes’s knowledge of Charles Darwin on natural selection and sexual selection. It then uses these threads of analysis to evaluate how Keynes conceived of mental reasoning processes more widely, and deduces his own answer to the question of whether the human mind is formed as a ‘blank slate.’ It concludes by suggesting that Keynes should be regarded as one of the first contributors to the field of evolutionary economic psychology.

Date: 2017
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