Victoria Chick: Beyond dualism – through paradox – to Keynes’s (international) political economy

The essay reviews Victoria Chick’s work of recovering the General Theory from the ‘Keynesian’ interpretation, and how throughout ‘dualism’ was used to aid this recovery. On theory, Chick’s approach is outlined to (1) the fallacy of composition; (2) microfoundations; (3) formalism; (4) uncertainty/determinacy; (5) equilibrium/disequilibrium; and (6) monetary duals. On policy, Chick warned of the dangers of growthmanship, European monetary initiative and financial deregulation. Sheila Dow’s suggestion to go beyond dualism using political economy motivates a fuller account. James Crotty’s label ‘liberal socialist’ captures well Keynes’s position. Just as Chick finds of Keynes’s theory, Keynes’s political economy is paradoxical. Rather than championing the state on the orthodox state/market dual, Keynes wanted power rebalanced to protect the market from too-great-an encroachment by the state. Ultimately Chick was interested in a synthesis of competing economic theories; following Simone Weil, the idea of agency is employed to this end. Rather than Chick’s insistence that changes in context require changes in theory, Keynes sought to change the context by theory in combination with agency. A final section discusses why this agency was not applied as he hoped. Orthodox economics has protected the interests of wealth, and the disastrous consequences should be unsurprising.