期刊名称：Discussion Paper / Département des Sciences Économiques de l'Université Catholique de Louvain
印刷版ISSN：1379-244X
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
出版社：Université catholique de Louvain
摘要：The aim of this paper is to elucidate Keynes's Marshallian lineage. I argue that the result of
bringing out the Marshallian antecedents of the General Theory highlights Keynes’s failure to
achieve the theoretical project he was striving at, namely to demonstrate an involuntary
unemployment result in the arising of which nominal wage rigidity would play no role.
In the first part of the paper, I reexamine Marshall’s theory of value. This section’s main
conclusion is that no theory of unemployment is to be found in Marshall’s writings. In section
two, I study the literature spanning from Marshall to Keynes, focusing on Beveridge, Hicks
and Pigou, in order to see whether the lacuna present in Marshall’s writings happened to be
filled. Documenting the emergence of the notion of frictional unemployment, I come to the
conclusion that its arising went along with little theoretical elaboration. The third and last part
of the paper is a critical reflection on the General Theory. I start by making the point that
Keynes’s theory of effective demand ought to be viewed as an extension of Marshall’s
analysis of firms’ short-period production decisions. This enables me to bring out the decisive
role played by the wage rigidity assumption in Keynes’s reasoning. I claim that, except for
this assumption, the differences between ‘effective demand à la Marshall’ and ‘effective
demand à la Keynes’ are minor. I close my analysis of Keynes’s reasoning by showing that
no real removal of the nominal rigidity assumption is to be found in chapter 19 of the General
Theory.
