MARCH I99I] KEYNESS GENERAL THEORY 77 I.I. The Objectivist/Essentialist Approach From the perspective of the objectivist/essentialist approach, the aim of interpretation is the rational reconstruction of the text in order to recover the author's original meaning. Interpretation is seen to be problematic because the author's meaning is hidden. The latency of the original meaning creates confusion and generates the possibility of multiple interpretations. The task of the interpreter is to resolve this confusion by discovering the'true' meaning of a text. This presupposes that the true meaning is knowable Within the objectivist/essentialist approach, Ke eyes s ener viewed as containing a single essential meaning which is hidden as the result of the confusion created either by Keynes himself or by the economics profession in its reading of Keynes. The belief that Keynes's General Theory contains a single essential meaning is shared by most interpreters of Keynes. Leijonhufvud (I968)claims to have found the 'economics of Keynes' as opposed to Keynesian economics,, while Shackle(1967, ch 12)seeks Keynes'sultimate meaning. Fender(1981)sets out to find the ' exact nature of the theoretical contribution of Keynes'(pp I, 2) and, similarly, Chick(1983)attempts to remedy the fact that the ' macroeconomics that has been developed after Keynes, though claiming inspirations from the General Theory, in my view has not, with some outstanding exceptions, been macroeconomics after the manner of Keynes-with the method and perspective and insight of Keynes'(p v) From the objectivist/essentialist perspective, it is necessary to explain wh the essential meaning of the General Theory is hidden. There are three broad types of explanation I)The confusion is author-generated A number of writers have suggested that Keynes himself is the cause of the onfusion. There are a number of variants of this'author-generated confusio (i)Technical incompetence. It is often argued that Keynes had limited analytical abilities. For example, Hahn(1982, pp x, xi)writes that 'I consider that Keynes had no real grasp of formal economic theorising(and also disliked it), and that he consequently left many gaping holes in his theory. 'This follows famous remark by Shove that Maynard had never spent the twenty minutes necessary to understand the theory of value(quoted in Robinson, I964, p 79 (ii)Thevision thesis. Confusion arises as the inevitable consequences of the difficulties which Keynes faced in trying to formulate his underlying vision in a precise analytical manner. It is a line of argument originating wit Schumpeter(1946, p. 5o1)who distinguishes between Keynes's vision, that is his 'view about the basic features of society, about what is and what is not important'and Keyness technique, that is, the ' apparatus by which he conceptualises his vision and which turns the latter into concrete propositions or theories. According to Schumpeter the General Theory is the final result of a long struggle by Keynes to make his vision analytically operative. Leijonhufvud