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The Cambridge Circus or Keynes's Circus was a group of young Cambridge economists closely associated with John Maynard #Keynes and active between 1930 and 1931. The group consisted of Richard Kahn, James Meade, Joan Robinson, Austin Robinson and Piero Sraffa. The Circus, as the ironic Sraffa gave it, formed soon after the publication of Keynes's A Treatise on Money on 31 October 1930.
The group of economists met to read and discuss the Treatise and to provide feedback on Keynes's continuing theoretical work that would lead to his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
Sraffa initiated the group, which met in Kahn's rooms in the Gibb's Building at King's College. The Circus met among themselves and at a seminar, which included some undergraduates, during the academic year 1930–1931. The seminar met in the Old Combination Room at Trinity College.
Kahn acted as the group's spokesman and met with Keynes weekly to discuss the Circus's thoughts. Kahn identified the "widow's crust" and "Danais jar" fallacies as the most substantive issue in the group's discussions. The issue related to Keynes's claim in the Treatise that an entrepreneur who spent his profits on consumer goods would increase the profits of another entrepreneur by the same amount and that these profits would seep into the economy endlessly like the oil from the widow's jar in 1 Kings 17:16. (The converse case, in which entrepreneurs save, is analogous to the Danaid jar never being filled.) The Circus challenged Keynes's implicit assumption that there was a fixed supply of consumer goods.
The group's influence on the General Theory has been debated.
The group did not keep records, but several first-hand accounts of the meetings of the Cantabrigen Circus have been published. Most agree that it was the Cambridge Circus, which was disbanded in the spring of 1931, that led Keynes to revise the positions of the Treatise and to undertake that “Keynesian Revolution” of which the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) is the manifesto.
Short Bibliography
Aslanbeigui N., Oakes G. (2002) “The Theory Arsenal: The Cambridge Circus and the Origins of the Keynesian Revolution”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24(1), Pp. 5-37.
Keynes, J. M. (1930) A Treatise on Money, Volumes I–II., Macmillan, London.
Marcuzzo M. C. - Paesani P. (2022) “The Cambridge ‘Circus’” in Marcuzzo- Paesani ed. Richard F. Kahn. Collected Economic Essays, Palgrave MacMillan, London
Marcuzzo M. C. (2023), "Cambridge ‘Circus’, in Elgar Encyclopedia of Post-Keynesian Economics, Edited By Rochoin L.P. - Rossi S., Pp.37-38, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Robinson, E. Austin G. R. (1994), "Richard Kahn in the 1930s", Cambridge Journal of Economics, 17, Pp. 7-10.
Antonio De Chiara @euroeconomie.it
