KEYNES, JOHN NEVILLE

born Aug. 31, 1852, Salisbury, Wiltshire, Eng. died Nov. 15, 1949, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire British philosopher and economist who synthesized the two poles of economic thought, using both inductive and deductive reasoning in his methodology. Keynes was educated at the universities of London and Cambridge. After graduating from Cambridge (1875), he was a lecturer in moral science there (18841911) and then served as registrar of the university (191025). He was active in the foundation of the Economics Tripos at Cambridge. Keynes's most important contributions to economics were as a logician and methodologist. His two chief works are Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884), which was popular for its clarity of expression and avoidance of mathematical symbolism, and his classic work on economic methodology, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). This work categorized the various approaches to economics as inductive and deductive, with Keynes adopting a syncretistic position. At a time when the German-speaking world was engaged in the Methodenstreit (battle of methods) between the Austrian economic school led by Carl Menger, which advocated a deductive approach and stressed the importance of pure theory, and the followers of German economist Gustav Schmoller, who insisted on the importance of inductive studies, Keynes, by contrast, insisted that both induction and deduction were required. He felt that inductive reasoning provided the general premises upon which deduction had to be based and that deduction resulted in generalizations or laws which then had to be tested by inductive procedures. Keynes was the father of the most influential economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes.