Volume 31, Number 18 · November 22, 1984
General Keynes
By John Kenneth Galbraith
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes
edited by Elizabeth Johnson, edited by Donald Moggridge
Cambridge University Press (for the Royal Economic Society), 29 vols. pp., $49.50 each, except
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 19, Activities 1924–29
edited by Elizabeth Johnson, edited by Donald Moggridge
Cambridge University Press (for the Royal Economic Society), 453 pp., $99.00
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 7, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
edited by Elizabeth Johnson, edited by Donald Moggridge
Cambridge University Press (for the Royal Economic Society), 428 pp., $9.95 (paper)
One of the astonishing and little-examined aberrations of academic, professional, and business life is the prestige that is accorded without thought to the specialist. A highly practical design by which a person of everyday energy or competence is enabled to make a useful or anyhow identifiable contribution to intellectual, scientific, or economic pursuits emerges as something intrinsically superior to more diverse, broader knowledge, or greater effort. In medicine the specialist is considered much superior professionally and socially to the general practitioner; one notes, these days, the effort to show that the family doctor—the general practitioner—can really be quite a reputable fellow in his or her own way. In academic life one hears fleeting praise for breadth of scholarship, but no one doubts that scholarly depth is much better. The businessman has long been advised to take care of his own business. One of our more improbable metaphors holds that a shoemaker should stick to his last. I have never encountered anyone who knew what a last was.
Review, 3025 words
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