It is with a sad heart that we note the passing of Axel Leijonhufvud on May 2. He wasn’t an Austrian (but rather, as a good Swede, a Wicksellian), nor did he like pigeonholes, but he leaves a large legacy that is relevant to the Austrian school. He, much like Roger Garrison, knew more about what Keynes said than most any other scholar, past or present. His dissertation, On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes, argued that Keynes’s General Theory didn’t actually deal with sticky wages and prices, but instead with intertemporal coordination failures. He was more interested in out-of-equilibrium processes than in mathematical models of equilibrium, and this led to his advising some of the former republics of the Soviet Union (notably, Kazakhstan) on how to transition to a market economy. He was a gentleman, and a true friend to those who knew him. He will be missed.
