[발췌: B. Caldwell's introduction to] Contra Keynes And Cambridge

• 출처: The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Vol. 9: Contra Keynes And Cambridge: Essays, Correspondeces. Bruce Caldwell ed., Univ. of Chicago Press 1989. 
• 자료: 구글도서

OF WHICH the Introduction by Bruce Caldwell:

※ 발췌(excerpts):

p. 40:

The Riddle of the Review

A riddle remain: Why did Hayek failed to write a review of The General Theory? Keynes has sent him an advance copy. In his letter of thanks, Hayek mentioned that he was puzzled by some parts, and found other parts troubling, and concluded that “if my present doubts remain I shall probably ask for your hospitality for some notes on particular points in the E. J. [Economic Journal]”[89] One suspects that his doubts were not dispelled by further study. So why did he never produce a review?

[89] Letter, Hayek to Keynes, February 2, 1936, reprinted in ^The General Theory and After: A Supplement^, ed. Donald Moggridge, vol. 29(1979) of ^The Collected Writings of J.M. Keynes^, op. cit., p. 208.

Hayek suggested some answer in three of the retrospective pieces included in this volume.[90] He returned to the question often, probably because, as he put it, "I have to the present day not quite got over a feeling that I then shirked what should have been a plain duty."[91] What reasons did Hayek offer to explain his uncharacteristic shirking?

[90] See "The Economics of the 1930s as Seen from London", pp.59-61, this volume; "Personal Recollections of Keynes and the Keynesian Revolution", pp. 240-241, this volume; "The Keynes Centenary: The Austrian Critique", pp. 251-252, this volume.
[91] "The Economics of the 1930s as Seen from London", p. 60, this volume

The first invokes Hayek's experience with his review of Keynes's Treatise. Having spent a good deal of time preparing his critique, and having felt that he had demolished Keynes's position in his review,

p.41:

Hayek was quite disappointed to receive a letter from Keynes saying that he had changed his mind and was working out a new model. Hayek wrote no review of The General Theory then because he assumed that by the time he had completed the task, Keynes would have changed his mind again.

On the face of it, this makes some sense. Keynes was famous, and not just among economists, for changing his mind. Indeed, mutability was part and parcel of his public persona: He was dubbed "the boneless man" in the press for his vacillation on free trade; despite his earnest (though unsuccessful) efforts on behalf of Lloyd George in the 1929 General Election, Keynes four years later released a scathing portrait of the "goat-footed bard" at Versailles in his ^Essays in Biography^, and one must not forget the Thomas Jones barb about five economists with six conflicting opinions. For many observers, Keynes was more mercury than Cassandra.[92]

But if Keynes's inconsistency in regard to theory were Hayek's sole reason for holding back criticism, then he was guilty of a serious misjudgement. Keynes manifestly had not changed his mind about the necessity of saving capitalism from itself. And given that Keynes called his book, in his own modest way, The General Theory, his intent should have been clear enough. Keynes's theoretical promiscuity is not, by itself, sufficient to account for Hayek's diffidence. If anything, it could well have provided just the ammunition that was needed for an effective counterattack.

In "The Economics of the 1930s as Seem from London", Hayek linked the 'Keynes-would-change-his-mind' argument to another: his own "tiredness from controversy".[95] This clearly constitutes a separate reason. To be sure, Hayek had good reason to be tired by 1936: He had been the centre of other controversies, fighting with Frank Knight over capital theory and with market socialists over planning; he had been unable to (... ...)

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CF. similar topic in another book

자료: [구글도서] A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation
지은이: Friedrich August Hayek

VI. Main Themes Restated

18. Personal Recollections of Keynes

Even to those who knew Keynes but could never bring themselves to accept his monetary theories, and at times thought his pronouncements somewhat irresponsible, the personal impression of the man remains unforgettable. And especially to my generation (he was my senior by 16 years) he was a hero long before he achieved real famous an economist theorist. Was he not the man who had had courage to protest against the economic clauses of the peace treaties of 1919? We admired the brilliantly written books for their outspokeness and independence of thought, even though some older and acuter thinkers at once pointed out certain theoretical flaws in his argument. And those of us who had the good fortune to meet him personally soon experienced the magnetism of the brilliant conversationalist with his wide range of interests and his bewitching voice.

I met hims first in 1928 in London at some meeting of institutes of business cycle research, and though we had at once our first strong disagreement on some point of interest theory, we remained thereafter friends who had many interests in common, although we rarely could agree on economics. He had a somewhat intimidating manner in which he would try to ride roughshod over the objections of a younger man, but if one stood up to him he would respect him forever afterwards even if he disagreed. After I moved from Vienna to London in 1931 we had much occasion for discussion both orally and by correspondence.

Keynes Changes His Mind

I had undertaken to review for Economica his Treasitse on Money which had then just appeared, and I put a great deal of work into two long articles on it. To the first of these he replied by a counterattack on my ^Prices and Production^. I felt that I had largely demolished his theoretical scheme (essentially Vol. I), though I had great admiration for the many profound but unsystematical insights contained in Volume II of the work. Great wa my disappointment when all this effort seemed wasted because after the appearance of the second part of my article he told me that he had in the meantime changed his mind and no longer believed what he said in that work.

This was one of the reasons why I did not return to the attack when he published his now famous General Theoryㅡa factor for which I later much blamed myself. But I feared that before I had completed my analysis he would again have changed his mind. Though he had called it a 'general theory', it was to me too obviously another tract for the times, conditioned by what he thought were the momentary needs of policy. But there was also another reason which I then only dimly felt but which in retrospect appears to me the decisive one: [:]

my disagreement with that book did not refer so much to any detail of the analysis as to the general approach followed in the whole work. The real issue was the validity of what we now call macro-analysis, and I feel now that in a long-run perspective the chief significance of the General Theory well appear that more than any other single work it decisively furthered the ascendancy of macro-economics and the temporary decline of micro-economic theory.

I shall later explain why I think that this development is fundamentally mistaken. But first I want to say that it is rather an irony of fate that Keynes should have become responsible for this swing to macro-theory. Because he thought in fact rather little of the kind of econometrics which was just then becoming popular, and I do not think that he owed any stimulus to it. His ideas were rooted entirely in Marshallian economics, which was in fact the only economics he knew. Widely read as Keynes was in many fields, his education in economics was somewhat narrow. He did not read any foreign language except Frenchㅡor, as he once said of himself, in German he could understand only what he knew already. It is a curious fact that before WWI he had reviewed Ludwig von Mises's ^Theory of Money^ for the ^Economic Journal^ (just as A.C. Pigou had a little earlier reviewed Wicksell) without in any way profiting from it. I fear it must be admitted that before he started to develop his own theories, Keynes was not a highly trained or a very sophisticated economic theories. He started from a rather elementary Marshallian economics and what had been achieved by Walras and Pareto, the Austrians and the Swedes was very much a closed book to him. I have reason to doubt whether he ever fully mastered the theory of international trade; I don't think he had ever thought systematically on the theory of capital, and even in the theory of the value of money his starting pointㅡand later the object of his criticismㅡappears to have been a very simple, equation-of-exchange-type of the quantity theory rather than the much more sophisticaed cash-balances approach of Alfred Marshall.

Thinking in Aggregates

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