as a man with a great many ideas who knew very little economics

meant literally too

see he knew nothing but Marshallian economics

he was completely unaware of what was going on elseware

he even knew very little about nineteenth century economic history his

interests were very largely guided by aesthetic appeal

and he hated the nineteenth century

and therefore knew very little about it

even about its scientific literature he was a really great expert on the

Elizabethan age

I'm absolutely astounded

that you say that John Maynard Keynes really did not know the economic literature

very little very little

even within the English tradition he did know very little of the

great monetary writers of the nineteenth century

he would know nothing about Henry Thornton

he knew a little about Ricardo of course the famous things but

he could have found any number of antecedents of his

inflationary ideas in the 1820's and 1830's

and when I told him about it it was all new to him

how did he react

was he sheepish? oh no not in the least

he was much too self assured and amused?

convinced that

what other people could have said about the subject was not frightfully important

....

at the end well not in the end there was a period just after he had written the General Theory where

he was so convinced he had re-done the whole science

that he was rather contemptuous of anything which had been done before

and did he maintain that confidence to the end

I can't say because I said before we'd almost stopped talking economics

great many other subjects

his general history of ideas and so on we were

interested

and you know I

I don't want you to get the impression that I underestimated him

as a brain he was one of the most intelligent and most original

thinkers I have known

but economics was just a sideline for him

and he had an amazing memory

he was extraordinarily widely read

but economics was not really his main interest- well his own economics

was he was convinced he could recreate the subject

and he rather had a contempt for

most of the other economists

does this tie in with your

Two Kinds of Minds you wrote in Encounter some years ago

well curiously enough I would say Keynes was rather my type of mind

and not the other

he is certainly could not have been described as a master of his subject

which describes the other type he was an

intuitive thinker with a

very wide knowledge in many fields

who'd never felt

that economics was weighty enough to

he just took it for granted that

Marshall's textbook

contained everything one needs to know about the subject

there was a certain

arrogance of Cambridge economics about and they thought they were the centre of

the world and if you have learned Cambridge economics there is nothing else worth learning

I'm interested in your earlier comment about the fact

that here is a man of immense intelligence

great imagination

wide learning and so on

and yet was not an economist and i'm not clear whether you mean

he didn't have the kind of mind that excels in economics just as

mathematics say you can find people who are brilliant but who given mathematics

are just hopeless

but do you mean he didn't have the kind of mind that makes for first rate

economists

oh he had I mean if he had given his whole mind

to economics he could have become

a master of economics

of the

existing body

but there were certain

parts of economic theory which he

had never been interested in

he had never thought about the theory of capital

he was very shaky even on the theory of of international trade

he was well informed on contemporary monetary theory but even there

he did not know such things as Henry Thornton or Wicksell

and of course his great effect was he did not read any foreign language except french

the whole german literature was inaccessible to him

he did curiously enough review Mises book on money but

later admitting that in german he could only understand what he knew already

what he had known before he read the book