This collection of essays of provides a comprehensive and detailed account of several aspects of the Cambridge School of Economics, which featured a number of outstanding figures such as Keynes, Sraffa, Kahn, and Joan Robinson. Scholars interested in heterodox economics, the history of economic thought and political economy will find in this book the Keynesian leitmotivs—the fight against unemployment, and the roles of money and uncertainty—which make Keynes’s legacy relevant for today’s world. The contributions here are written in the spirit of Keynes, and are persuasive and accessible to the general public.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Essays in Persuasion" by John Maynard Keynes. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
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.
The essays in this volume show Keynes's attempts to influence the course of events by public persuasion over the period of 1919-40. In the light of subsequent history, Essays in Persuasion is a remarkably prophetic volume covering a wide range of issues in political economy. In articles on the Versailles Treaty. John Maynard Keynes foresaw all too clearly that excessive Allied demands for reparations and indemnities would lead to the economic collapse of Germany. In Keynes's essays on inflation and deflation, the reader can find ideas that were to become the foundations of his most renowned treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). With startling accuracy Keynes forecast the economic fluctuations that were to beset the economies of Europe and the United States and even proposed measures which, if heeded at the time, might have warded off an era of world-wide depression. His views on Soviet Russia, on the decline of laissez-faire, and the possibilities of economic growth are as relevant today as when Keynes originally set them forth.
This Festschrift is published in honour of Annalisa Rosselli, a political economist and historian of economic thought, whose academic activity has promoted unconventional ways of thinking throughout her career. A renowned list of scholars articulate and respond to this vision through a series of essays, leading to an advocacy of pluralism and critical thinking in political economy. The book is split into five parts, opening with a section on new topics for the history of economic thought including new perspectives in gender studies and an illustration of the fecundity of the link with economic history. This is followed by sections that address relevant perspectives on the Classical approach to distribution and accumulation, Ricardo, interpretation of Sraffa and the legacy of Keynes. This book will appeal to students interested in reforming economics, as well as academics and economists interested in political economy and the history of economic thought.
Keynes is one of the most important and influential economists who ever lived. It is almost universally believed that Keynes wrote his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to save capitalism from the socialist, communist, and fascist forces that were rising up during the Great Depression era. This book argues that this was not the case with respect to socialism. Tracing the evolution of Keynes’s views on policy from WWI until his death in 1946, Crotty argues that virtually all post-WWII "Keynesian" economists misinterpreted crucial parts of Keynes’s economic theory, misunderstood many of his policy views, and failed to realize that his overarching political objective was not to save British capitalism, but rather to replace it with Liberal Socialism. This book shows how Keynes’s Liberal Socialism began to take shape in his mind in the mid-1920s, evolved into a more concrete institutional form over the next decade or so, and was laid out in detail in his work on postwar economic planning at Britain’s Treasury during WWII. Finally, it explains how The General Theory provided the rigorous economic theoretical foundation needed to support his case against capitalism in support of Liberal Socialism. Offering an original and highly informative exposition of Keynes’s work, this book should be of great interest to teachers and students of economics. It should also appeal to a general audience interested in the role the most important economist of the 20th century played in developing the case against capitalism and in support of Liberal Socialism. Keynes Against Capitalism is especially relevant in the context of today’s global economic and political crises.
A groundbreaking debunking of moderate attempts to resolve financial crises In the ruins of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, self-proclaimed progressives the world over clamored to resurrect the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. The crisis seemed to expose the disaster of small-state, free-market liberalization and deregulation. Keynesian political economy, in contrast, could put the state back at the heart of the economy and arm it with the knowledge needed to rescue us. But what it was supposed to rescue us from was not so clear. Was it the end of capitalism or the end of the world? For Keynesianism, the answer is both. Keynesians are not and never have been out to save capitalism, but rather to save civilization from itself. It is political economy, they promise, for the world in which we actually live: a world in which prices are “sticky,” information is “asymmetrical,” and uncertainty inescapable. In this world, things will definitely not take care of themselves in the long run. Poverty is ineradicable, markets fail, and revolutions lead to tyranny. Keynesianism is thus modern liberalism’s most persuasive internal critique, meeting two centuries of crisis with a proposal for capital without capitalism and revolution without revolutionaries. If our current crises have renewed Keynesianism for so many, it is less because the present is worth saving, than because the future seems out of control. In that situation, Keynesianism is a perfect fit: a faith for the faithless.
Leading economists revisit a provocative essay by John Maynard Keynes, debating Keynes's vision of growth, inequality, work, leisure, entrepreneurship, consumerism, and the search for happiness in the twenty-first century.
