Lytton Strachey and the New History

Recently, thanks largely to the persistence of G. L. S. Shackle, economists have come to accept the fact that the concept of uncertainty is at the centre of The General Theory. In earlier chapters we related the concept to Keynes’s Apostolic life, to G. E. Moore’s criticism of the utilitarian notion of judging by ‘consequences’ and to his epistemological ‘common sense’ (for the common man knows that there are things about which ‘your guess is as good as mine’). To a large extent, though, the concept of uncertainty owes much to ‘the Bloomsbury method’ — a method that relied on psychology as an explanatory tool. Perhaps this is the greatest innovation of The General Theory: after one hundred years of following geometrical modes of thought, a treatise arose that asked economists to adopt psychological modes of thinking Before dealing with that book, we shall illustrate the new method in the work of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, as we illustrated it before in the New Aesthetics.