Keynes' Political Philosophy: The Gesell Connection

Abstract

Karl Marx perhaps the most astute student of economic doctrine, once made the famous and apposite observation that in substantial passages of "The Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith "was very copiously infected with the conceptions of the Physiocrats." In parallel fashion this paper agues that in substantial portions of "The General Theory," J. M. Keynes was a mere Gesellist, particularly but not uniquely, in his expressions of political philosophy vis-a-vis the relationship between state and economy.