In summary, in my judgment, Keynes was a politician, but a politician whose constituency was not electoral but intellectual he had to be a scientist to be a politician. And he was a good enough scientist, with a strong enough sense of scientific integrity, and a strong enough aesthetic preference for truth, to recognize eventually that the social science he knew was not good enough to solve the problems he recognized as politically important and that he had to reform the science to make it politically relevant and useful. He was a scientific political economist. One can emphasize either the "scientific" or the "political" and which adjective one emphasizes depends on whether one is writing a political biography of the man himself or a history of economic thought but both adjectives are appropriate and both are necessary to characterize what the man was and what he contributed to British society and British social history.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In summary, in my judgment, Keynes was a politician, but a politician whose constituency was not electoral but intellectual he had to be a scientist to be a politician. And he was a good enough scientist, with a strong enough sense of scientific integrity, and a strong enough aesthetic preference for truth, to recognize eventually that the social science he knew was not good enough to solve the problems he recognized as politically important and that he had to reform the science to make it politically relevant and useful. He was a scientific political economist. One can emphasize either the "scientific" or the "political" and which adjective one emphasizes depends on whether one is writing a political biography of the man himself or a history of economic thought but both adjectives are appropriate and both are necessary to characterize what the man was and what he contributed to British society and British social history." in the context of "Elizabeth Johnson, "John Maynard Keynes: Scientist or Politician?", Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1974)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.