Following in Shionoya's footsteps. Perfectionism and in Keynes's political philosophy

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw an upsurge of interest in Keynes’s philosophical thinking, possibly favoured by the availability of the full set of the Collected Works, the reunion of all his papers at King’s (the catalogue was completed in 1993) and soon after the microfilming of all his entire papers (Cox 1995). Over the last 30 years or so a large literature has developed on the subject, which has branched out in various directions. Two main concerns can be found in this literature: a) the question of the continuity of Keynes’s views and approach, since the early philosophical essays, through the Treatise on Probability to the General Theory; b) how Keynes’s economics is intertwined with his ethics and epistemology. In this paperI am focusing on a narrower topic (perfectionism and consequentialism in Keynes’s ethics and political philosophy) following in the footsteps of Y. Shionoya, whose contribution on the subject I revisited on the occasion of a commemoration held in at the Eshet Conference in Paris, in May 2016.