ABSTRACT
When The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published on 4 February 1936, its author, John Maynard Keynes, then 52 years old, was Britain’s most famous and influential economist. This book would secure his rise to the first rank among twentieth-century economists, and ultimately his eminence among the other great names in the history of political economy such as Smith, Ricardo and Marx. Ten years after the publication of his book, on Easter Sunday 21 April 1946, Keynes died, laid low by the last of a series of heart attacks which had first struck him in 1937. He lived to see the partial achievement of the prophecy made to his friend George Bernard Shaw on 1 January 1935. Indeed, in 1946, The General Theory had already made an impression as a book ‘which will largely revolutionise-not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years-the way the world thinks about economic problems’ (JMK, XIII, p. 492). Thus Keynes used the expression ‘revolutionise’ to characterize the impact of his work. The ‘Keynesian revolution’ formula would appear in the title of a book by Lawrence Klein (1947) which played an important role in the diffusion of Keynesian ideas in the United States.
