author
John Neville Keynes
1852–1949
A Cambridge economist and logician, he is remembered both for his own work on economic method and for helping shape the intellectual world around one remarkable family. His writing tried to bridge rival ways of thinking about economics, making abstract debate feel more practical and disciplined.
1 Audiobook
Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic
by John Neville Keynes
About the author
Born in Salisbury in 1852, he studied at University College London and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1876. He later taught in Cambridge’s Moral Sciences program and served as Registrary of the University of Cambridge from 1910 to 1925, a senior administrative post that placed him at the center of university life.
His best-known books include Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884) and The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). In economics, he is especially associated with trying to reconcile deductive and inductive approaches, and with the distinction between positive economics, normative economics, and the practical “art” of economics.
He is often introduced as the father of John Maynard Keynes, but John Neville Keynes was an important scholar in his own right. Married to Florence Ada Brown, he was part of a family deeply woven into British intellectual and public life, and he lived long enough to see major changes in both economics and Cambridge itself.