This book is a collection of invited essays on Keynes edited by Bateman and Backhouse.All of the essays are based on the past work of the authors.For example,Peden repeats his previous work comparing and contrasting Keynes's view and the Treasury view about the causes of the Great Depression;Bateman and Backhouse,Gillies,Raffaelli, and Bateman repeat their claims that Keynes allegedly capitulated to Ramsey's devastating and annihilating intellectual attack on his logical theory of probability and became a follower either of Ramsey's approach or something called the intersubjective theory of probability invented by Gillies in 1990(See p.5,18,173,205-208).The same pattern appears in the papers by Leijonhufvud,Laidler,Klaes,etc..The only original research that appears in this volume is the paper by Hoover on Keynes's technical approach in his 1924 Tract on Monetary Reform.
The discussion of the role of mathematics and Keynes contained in the essay by Bateman and Backhouse is not original.They state the following: "His(Keynes's)model could(italicized)be interpreted in terms of his vision,but there was no necessity to do so"(2006,p.12;see also p.15).This argument is identical to the Feb.-March,1935 assessment of D.Robertson which Keynes rejected by pointing out to Robertson that his analysis had only one interpretation that was contained in a chapter dealing with the employment function(see Collected Writings JMK,Vol.13,p.514,1973).Chapter 20 of the General Theory is titled "The Employment Function".None of the essay authors deal with this chapter on which Keynes stated that "Everything turns on".(ibid.,p.520).
The one article most in need of revision is the article by Gillies.Gillies bases his entire assessment of Keynes 's theory on the following ad hominem argument made by Ramsey: "...there really do not seem to be any such things as the probability relations he describes...I feel confident that this is not true(that people intuit or perceive a connection between statements of an inductive nature).I do not perceive them...I shrewdly suspect that others do not perceive them either.."(See Gillies discussion on pp.205-208).These are claims that need to be proven.Since Ramsey rejects inductive logic,he needs to supply a deductive proof to support his claims.Of course,neither Ramsey nor Gillies nor any other logician or philosopher has ever supplied such a deductive proof.
The major flaw in all of the essays dealing with probability is that they ignore Keynes's clear definition of probability contained in chapter 15 of the TP on p.160 which defines probabilities to be intervals with upper and lower limits and not the ordinal rankings or comparative approach to probability that Ramsey foisted on Keynes in two book reviews written in 1922 and 1926,respectively.Ramsey's claims about Keynes's " nonnumerical probability " not using any numbers except in very special circumstances is directly contradicted by Keynes definition as well as some thirteen problems worked out on pp.161-163 and 186-194 in 1921 in the A Treatise on Probability(TP).Unfortunately ,all of the essay writers in this book who discuss Keynes's views on probability rely exclusively on these two reviews,as well as a highly selective reading of chapter 3 of the TP that ignores the six statements made by Keynes about intervals(see TP,pp.22-24,28-2931-32,and 35).
