Jul 23
“For a variety of reasons I have come to believe that the aggregating term ‘classical political economy’ has become an encumbrance. At the very least we ought to remember that the term was coined by Marx for his own purposes in displaying his relationship to his chosen predecessors, just as Keynes was to re-coin the same term for similar purposes later. In Keynes’s case it was to describe all those who had assumed that full employment was the normal state of affairs under capitalism. We need the term to understand Marx and Keynes, but their use of ‘classical’ may have little to do with what those being lumped together felt themselves to be doing and were in fact doing.”
Donald Winch, Secret Concatenations: Mandeville to Malthus (2015)
