The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge in 1883, son of John Neville
Keynes, later registrary of the university; his mother was one of the earliest
women students. Educated at Eton and King’s, he passed into the Civil
Service in 1906, working for three years in the India Office. He returned to
Cambridge as a Fellow of K ing’s in 1909 and remained a Fellow until his
death.

Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914 he was called to the Treasury. Over
the next four years his ability and his immense capacity for work took him to
the top. By 1919 he was principal Treasury representative at the Peace
Conference at Versailles. His passionate disagreement with decisions regarding
reparations led to his resignation and the writing of The Economic
Consequences of the Peace. F rom then on, Keynes was a national figure, in
the centre of every economic argument and the author of countless ‘Keynes
Plans’ to solve one problem after another.

In 1936 he published the most provocative book written by any economist of
his generation. The General Theory, as it is known to all economists, cut
through all the Gordian knots of pre-Keynesian discussion of the trade cycle
and propounded a new approach to the determination of the level of
economic activity, the problems of employment and unemployment, the
causes of inflation, the strategies of budgetary policy. Arguments about the
book continued until his death in 1946 and still continue today. Despite all
that has been written in the subsequent quarter of a century, Keynes and his
book still represent the turning-point between the old economics and the new
from which each generation of economists needs to take its inspiration and its
point of departure towards fresh attempts to carry his work further.

This new edition provides a complete version of the original text, corrected in
the light of subsequent correspondence. It also brings together all of Keynes’s
prefaces to subsequent foreign translations and prints as appendixes two
articles by Keynes, making minor modifications of views set forth in the text.