2 Keeping the Keynesians off-stage
2.1 Introduction There is a basic preliminary to be fulfilled in order to carry our investigation out, which is to separate the wheat from the chaff. In our view, a proper investigation on Keynes’ and Friedman’s analyses of stability requires clearly and strongly disentangling Keynes from the Keynesians. This means a two-step approach. First, there is the necessity to clearly disentangle Keynes from what Friedman considers his Keynesian opponents. Second, there is the necessity to disentangle in the statements, critiques and arguments put forward by Friedman the ones that fall within his critique of the Keynesians from original analyses he puts forward, in other words to disentangle his critique of Keynesianism from his contribution to the edification of the monetarist school of thought. But as Coddington (1976) acknowledges, there is a variety of Keynesianism, so that we have to be particularly careful in our disentanglement attempt. Here, we will be concerned mainly with the Keynesians of the neo-classical synthesis, the ‘hydraulic’ version of Keynesianism. Indeed, time elapsed between Keynes’ revolution and Friedman’s most influential papers. As a matter of fact, in almost all his writings Friedman battles with Keynes’ heirs (and especially the ones of the neo-classical synthesis) instead of Keynes himself. That means that our investigation of Keynes’ and Friedman’s respective political economics runs the risk of being distorted by the presence of the Keynesians, or at least by the proponents of the neo-classical Keynesian synthesis. Things are rendered even more intractable if one remembers the appraisal of the Keynesian school by each of our authors, including Keynes himself. On the one hand, there is the famous “I am not a Keynesian” the late Keynes is supposed to have claimed at the time of ‘functional finance’ and ‘inflationary gap’ analysis. On the other, Friedman’s own position is said to have moved. Friedman himself acknowledges in his memoirs that he began his career as a Keynesian.1 It is commonly considered that in the end “we even find Friedman putting Keynes in his own camp, as against the Walrasian orthodoxy that raised to domination in the post World War era” (Dostaler 1998, p. 320). Between the two, one finds the monetarist counter-revolution. Avoiding ventriloquism and going back to the original theoretical and political writings of our two authors proves a true necessity.
