Eucken’s Competition with Keynes
Résumé
This chapter explores how Walter Eucken situated himself in respect to John Maynard Keynes’s thought. It will be shown in particular that Keynes and Eucken were less alien to one another that is commonly assumed in the secondary literature. By considering together Keynes and Eucken’s letters to Hayek in response to The Road to Serfdom (1944), a somehow shared criticism is revealed. Keynes and Eucken both notably concentrated on the state positive assignments in order to ensure the proper functioning of a decentralized market economy. Moreover, there was a significant parallel in both methodological and theoretical arguments. Eventually, the Keynes/Eucken contrast proved meaningful for those who wanted to shed light on how they both left such a long-lasting mark on post-WWII European Liberalism.