Réseaux intellectuels et projet créateur : le marché des amis de John Neville Keynes

Résumé 0

John Neville Keynes’s Scope and Method of Political Economy rapidly became a classic after its publication in 1891. In this book the Cambridge logician and economist introduced a threefold distinction between the science, the art, and the ethics of political economy, which came to be regarded as the best exposition of the autonomy of economics as a new science. In this paper, the author argues that the invention of this distinction can be best understood in the context of late-Victorian agnosticism. J.N. Keynes, in the 1870s and 1880s, experienced agnosticism not only as a personal crisis of faith, but also as a transformation in his sociability. As a Congregationalist, J.N. Keynes was one of the first nonconformists to become a College fellow in Cambridge in 1871. This particular position gave him many opportunities to realize the difficulties of mixing his personal and professional beliefs. In a context of increasing specialization of intellectual life, his intellectual project was to combine his increasingly agnostic approach with nonconformist religion, his neoaristotelian formal logic and the new science of political economy. To his intellectual endeavour to combine religious, philosophical and economic principles corresponded his more practical struggle to mix the nonconformist, professional and intellectual sides of his social network. Keynes’ attitude to the logic of economics reflected his own experience of incommensurability of values. It is therefore paradoxical that his readers saw in his Scope and Method an authoritative exposition of the scientificity of economics.