Collected works of Keynes
21 total works
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
by John Maynard Keynes
This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes' biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes' argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned.
Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes' theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes' work in today's contemporary climate.
John Maynard Keynes, then a rising young economist, participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief representative of the British Treasury and advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He resigned after desperately trying and failing to reduce the huge demands for reparations being made on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Keynes' brilliant and prophetic analysis of the effects that the peace treaty would have both on Germany and, even more fatefully, the world. A popular lecturer of economics at Cambridge University and editor of the Economic Journal, Keynes made The Economic Consequences of the Peace a major step in his career. It was translated into a dozen languages and sold 100,000 copies in six months. Taken seriously even by those who were opposed to his claims, the book helped lift economics to a new, higher level of recognition and acceptance.
This volume, with its insightful portraits of Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson, remains one of the great works of political economy of our time. In a penetrating introduction written for this new edition, David Felix explores Keynes' reasons for writing the book, analyzes the author's arguments, and paints an historical backdrop of the period during which it was written.