KEYNES (John Maynard).
The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money.
Keynes’ greatest work and surely the most influential text of twentieth-century economics, complete with a modestly restored example of the rare dust jacket.
Prompted by the world wide-slump following 1929, Keynes set upon an ‘explanation of, and new methods for controlling, the vagaries of the trade-cycle. First in A Treatise on Money, 1930, and later in his General Theory, he subjected the definitions and theories of the classical school of economists to a penetrating scrutiny and found seriously inadequate and inaccurate. … [Keynes’] programme for national and international official monetary policies [was based on the premise that the] national budget, over and above its function of providing a national income, should be used as a major instrument in planning the national economy. The regulation of the trade-cycle - that is to say the control of booms and slumps, the level of employment, the wage-scale and the flow of investment - must be the responsibility of governments. Lost equilibrium in a national economy could and should be restored by official action and abandoned to laisser faire’ (PMM).
The grip of Keynesian economics took hold almost immediately, informing aspects of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, the formation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as many of the policies of the post-war British Labour government.
PMM, 423; Moggridge A10.
