Keynes on Atomism and Organicism

John Davis

Economic Journal, 1989, vol. 99, issue 398, 1159-72

Abstract: This paper examines John Maynard Keynes's early, unpublished paper "Miscellanea Ethica," and concludes that Keynes developed an atomist view of economic agents based on the assumption that the individual mind is an organic unity. The paper argues this view was part of Keynes's subjectivist critique of the realist tenets of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, and that Keynes retained this view of the agent in the Treatise on Probability, the biography of F. Y. Edgeworth, the critique of J. Tinbergen, and The General Theory. The paper concludes that the recent literature arguing that Keynes adopted an organicist view of agents in the economy lacks foundation. Copyright 1989 by Royal Economic Society.

Date: 1989
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