Economics 99FCS-36
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
Syllabus: Fall 2009
Professor E. Roy Weintraub
Office: Social Sciences 013; Phone (and voice mail):
660-1838; E-mail: erw@duke.edu
This seminar will examine the life and
work of one of the truly
important figures of the twentieth century,
John Maynard Keynes.
The context of the development of Keynes's
thought in late Victorian
and the influence of Moore and the
Apostles, sets the stage
for an examination of Keynes's emerging
role as government advisor,
journalist, teacher, and economist. The
seminar will study
his connections to the Bloomsbury Group as
well as his non-economic writings,
both political and biographical. The
emergent focus will be Keynes's
influential General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money,
its intellectual background, and its
consequences.
Required
reading will be the single volume (paperback) abridgement of the three volume
biography of Keynes by Lord Robert Skidelsky titled John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Statesman, Philosopher. There are additional readings from Keynes’s
book Essays
in Persuasion (paperback), which is also available
at the Duke bookstore.
As
is appropriate for a First Year Seminar, each class will be organized as a
discussion about the weekly reading. Each class member will prepare a one to
two page “response paper” each week to that week’s primary reading (in
Skidelsky). Those papers will be the basis for the class discussion in each
week’s class. I will select one student who will be responsible for leading the
class discussion. That student will need to have done all the reading for that
week in some detail. As a final semester exercise, all students (who are
roughly the ages of the (great-)grandchildren Keynes never had) will write a
paper of 10-15 pages examining/assessing/appraising/responding to Keynes’s 1930
essay “The
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (also contained in Essays in Persuasion), focusing
primarily on the current economic difficulties and their relation to Keynes’s
arguments.
COURSE OUTLINE
Number
n is "For the nth week ...". Required chapters for reading and
discussion each week, in the Skidelsky biography, are noted in square brackets
as [X-Y]. Essays or other material are noted in curly brackets as {X-Y}
1. BBC video on
Keynes, titled “Spend and Prosper” [1]
2. Growing up
[2-3]; {first three chapter of John Neville Keynes’s The Scope
and Method of Political Economy}
3. Eton and Cambridge [4-5]; {Eton}
4. Cambridge Friends
[6-8]; {Lytton Strachey’s “Florence
Nightingale” in Eminent Victorians}
5. From Cambridge to the Treasury via Bloomsbury
[9-11]; {Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (Chapter 1)}
6. Keynes in the War Government [12-14]; {The Arts -- Roger
Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell; Bertrand Russell’s “Why
Men Fight”}
7. The Peace
Treaty [15-16]; {1.1-1.3}
8. Keynes in
the Post War period [17-20];{2.1,2.2}
9. Monetary Reform, Gold, and the Liberal Party [21-24]; {3.1, 3.5}
10. The Slump and the Treatise [25-26]; {2.4}
11. To The General Theory [27-29]; {4.1,4.2}
12. The General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money [30]; {4.3,4.4}
13. Keynes and World War II [31-35]
14. Constructing the Post War World
[36-40]
15. A Life’s Conclusion
[41-epilogue]
Note:
I will try to hold to this schedule, but reserve the option to move topics
around a bit as time and interests dictate.
It is not “ok” to miss class. This is a seminar, and engaged
participation is very important.
Grades will be based
on (1) weekly response papers: 45%; (2) participation in general class
discussions: 25%; (3) leadership of a discussion: 10%; (4) final paper: 20%.