Keynes and Coase

Abstract

Ronald Coase has written provocatively on the methodology of positive economics, but this aspect of his work is not well known or much attended to, and to the extent it is noticed, it is regarded by most modern economists as eccentric, as it involves a rejection of rational choice theory. The effort in this paper is to rescue his methodological writings from obscurity and note the hitherto unremarked, and paradoxical, methodological affinity between him and John Maynard Keynes, whose unmodern approach to economics is enjoying renewed respect in the wake of the global economic crisis that began in 2008.