Keynes and ‘Stream of Consciousness’ or What Keynes Could Have Learnt From Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury group, a group that took its credo in some measure from the philosophy of G.E. Moore. However Keynes was unable to follow through the implications of this early influence into his economics cumbered as he was with his ‘Marshallian baggage’. Virginia Woolf, as another member of the Bloomsbury group, shared with Keynes habits of perception and conduct inspired by Moore. The paper explores the relationship between the methods of the two authors. It is argued that Keynes insufficiently incorporated consciousness into his schema, an entity essential to Moore’s critique of idealism. Woolf more completely imbibed Moore’s insight that perception does not bear any simple correspondence with the external world. Secondly, there is Moore’s distinction between personal and universal modes of perception. Woolf’s novels present not just one person whose consciousness is rendered but many people with incessant shifts from one to the other. For his part, Keynes’s work contains only the germs of a philosophy of probability according to which probability can be viewed as the degree of intersubjective belief of a group.