Was Keynes Kuhnian? Keynes and the Idea of Theoretical Revolutions

Abstract

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.