The Consequences of Mr Keynes?

Abstract

The Keynesian Revolution was essentially a revolution of economic principles rather than, say, of policy prescriptions. As a consequence, the criticism of the General Theory which followed its publication in 1936 — and which, as we have seen, found its most telling expression in the work of D.H. Robertson — was directed primarily at the fundamentals of Keynes’s theory. Nevertheless, the conclusions that Keynes derived from his theory were clearly intended to have important implications for policy, and it was on the question of the consequences that were said to flow from the application of Keynes’s ideas that the Keynesian Revolution was ultimately to face its greatest challenge.