Overlapping Research Programmes in Keynes's General Theory

It has often been argued that Keynes’s General Theory is full of inconsistencies yet their nature has scarcely been explored in detail. In this paper, I argue that Keynes’s basic inconsistency lies in his aiming at bringing together a series of concepts which, with hindsight, prove to be irreconciliable, namely involuntary unemployment, system failure, general equilibrium, demand policy. This indictment of Keynes’s research programme should not be extended, I further argue, to mainstream Keynesian research programmes, because they have abandonned the claim of demonstrating all these concepts together. The overall evolution of Keynesian theory can then be highlighted as a replacement of Keynes’s unique yet contradictory research programme by a handful of (a) more or less overlapping, (b) in principle consistent, (c) yet incomplete research programs against Keynes’s own project.