Keynes and Marx Reconsidered: The Case of Maurice Dobb

ABSTRACT

After an introduction outlining the issues at stake in the study of Dobb's intellectual relationship to Keynes, I begin with a (necessarily brief) account of Keynes's attitude towards Dobb. I then discuss the much more extensive evidence concerning Dobb's reaction to Keynes, published and unpublished, in three sections that terminate respectively with the death of Keynes (in 1946), with the writing of Dobb's autobiographical notes (in 1965), and with his own death (in 1977). A brief conclusion draws some inferences on what Dobb's career can tell us about the broader relationship between Marxian and Keynesian economics.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• capitalism
• Keynesian economics
• macroeconomics
• economic crises

JEL Codes:

• B14
• B21
• B22
• B24
• B31

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to an anonymous referee for thought-provoking comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Most oddly, the index contains two additional mistaken footnote references (to p. 210, where the reference is actually to J.R. Hicks's Value and Capital, and — bizarrely — to p. 350, which does not exist, as the text ends on p. 349).

2 Shenk reports that Dobb later described the General Theory as ‘seldom comprehensible’, and as late as 1960 he flatly refused to comment on his student Brian Pollitt's summary of the book: ‘you can do it and I can't’, he told the first-year undergraduate (Shenk 2013b).

3 The others relate to Keynes's treatment in the Treatise on Money of inflation in the 16th-century (Dobb 1946, p. 120, 235 and 237) and to his views on Mercantilism (Dobb 1946, p. 201).

4 An anonymous referee has suggested to me that Dobb was significantly influenced by Keynes in this book, even though there is no direct evidence in the text of any such influence. I am inclined to think that Dobb only began to collect his thoughts on Keynes after the latter's death in 1946, with the onset of the Cold War being another possibly relevant factor.

5 I must here express my gratitude to the late Fred Lee, a genuine socialist who truly believed that ideas are public property, along with the documentary sources from which they are derived, and in October 2000 sent me photocopies of a large bundle of Dobb's letters and unpublished lectures that he had found in the Cambridge archives.

6 The other three contributors to Part IV were A.K. Das Gupta, V.K.R.V. Rao and V.B. Singh (the volume editor), all of whom did have something to say on ‘Keynesianism and Underdeveloped Countries’ (the heading of the four papers in Part IV).

7 The third and final section of chapter 8 deals with developments in welfare economics (pp. 240–246).