The general theory after ten years [1946]

Abstract

I shall confine myself in this essay to the purely scientific content of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the most famous of Keynes’ economic works, whose tenth anniversary unhappily coincided with the death of its author. In the light of ten years of intense and voluminous discussion, what remains of the Keynesian revolution, of the New Economics? What will be the verdict of a historian of economic thought one hundred years hence? There is no doubt Keynes stirred the stale economic frog pond to its depth. He has kept economists in a state of agitation for the last ten years, and probably for many years to come. The brilliance of his style, the versatility, flexibility, incredible quickness, and fecundity of his mind, the many-sidedness of his intellectual interests, the sharpness of his wit, in one word the fullness of his personality, was bound to fascinate scores of people in and outside the economic profession. Only a dullard or narrow-minded fanatic could fail to be moved to admiration by Keynes’ genius. But the novelty and validity of the propositions which constitute his system are a different matter altogether-quite independent of the challenging way in which he pronounced them, of the psychological stimulus afforded by his bold attack on widely accepted modes of thought, of much needed change in emphasis which we owe to his book, and of the wisdom (or unwisdom) of his policy recommendations.