The General Theory
by John Maynard Keynes (1936)
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[p.1]
BOOK I
INTRODUCTION
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[p.3]
Chapter 1
THE GENERAL THEORY
I have called this book the General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money, placing the emphasis on the prefix general.
The object of such a title is to contrast the character of my
arguments and conclusions with those of the classical [1]
theory of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which
dominates the economic thought, both practical and theoretical,
of the governing and academic classes of this generation, as it
has for a hundred years past. I shall argue that the postulates
of the classical theory are applicable to a special case only and
not to the general case, the situation which it assumes being a
limiting point of the possible positions of equilibrium.
Moreover, the characteristics of the special case assumed by the
classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society
in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is
misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts
of experience.
Footnotes:
[p.3] 1 - "The classical economists" was a name invented by Marx to cover Ricardo and James Mill and their predecessors, that is to say for the founders of the theory which culminated in the Ricardian economics. I have become accustomed, perhaps perpetrating a solecism, to include in "the classical school" the followers of Ricardo, those, that is to say, who adopted and perfected the theory of the Ricardian economics, including (for example), J.S. Mill, Marshall, Edgeworth and Prof. Pigou. [back to text]
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