「メイナード•ケインズ問題」について (平成九年五月一二日 提出)

抄録

There are difficult problems which have been called as titles starting from names of famous economists.
One is the well-known“Adam Smith Problem”which puzzled some German economists in the last half of nineteenth century.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759, Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, and regarded“sympathy”as the main motive of human behavior, whereas, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), he was an economist, and protected“self interest”as a human nature which contributes for economic efficiency. How can these apparently paradoxical and contradictory arguments of Adam Smith be reconciled? This is nothing but“the Adam Smith Problem.”
Another is“the Maynard Keynes Problem”which was studied in a sequence of works after the last half of the decade 1980, as is clarified in the article, “Das Maynard Keynes Problem”by Bradley W. Batemam. Particularly influential among them were On Keynes's Method by Anna M. Carabelli (1988) and Keynes: Philosophy, Economics, and Politics by R. M. O'Donnell (1989). They were followed up by Keynes's Philosophical Development (1994) by John B. Davis and the very recently published Keynes's Uncertain Revolution by B. W. Bateman (1996).
In the article entitled as“My Early Beliefs”(1949), J.M. Keynes defined ‘religion’as one's attitude towards oneself and the ultimate, and‘morals’as one's attitude towards the outside world. Keynes in the early period tried to be an immoralist in order to be emancipated from the traditional Benthamism. For this purpose, the early Keynes accepted only the‘religion’and threw away the‘morals.’He was the“last Utopian”who convinced himself a priori that all the people other than himself were as innately rational as himself.
Keynes in the later period on the other hand, cast away his early belief that all the people are rational by human nature. He accepted irrationality in the broad sense and emphasized the importance of 'conventional judgments' which depend on the opinions of the other in contrast to the judgments of the rational individual.
Instead of the atomistic view of a society, Keynes in the later period premised the model of society in which individual decisions are made by the mutually interdependent expectations. According to him, economics as a moral science is established on the basis of such a model of society, and is methodologically completely different from economics as a pseudo-natural-science which is based on the atomistic view of a society.
The difference between the early thoughts of Keynes and the later one is clearly a discontinuous change of view rather than a continuous change in degrees of stresses on different viewpoints.
I think that nowhere other than here lies the center of the Keynesian revolution.