General theorising and historical specificity in the ‘Keynes vs. the Classics’ dispute

This paper addresses the issues of general theorising and historical specificity in the ‘Keynes vs. the Classics’ dispute and puts forward two main arguments. First, the current macroeconomic orthodoxy wins the ‘relative’ generality contest because it implies that institutions influence outcomes, such as the natural rate of unemployment, in contrast with Keynes’s ‘internalist’ approach, which neglects historical specificity. Secondly, mainstream macro is not truly general in an ‘absolute’ sense since it only makes sense under very special real-world institutional conditions.