ABSTRACT
When the onset of the world slump in the 1930s added an enormous sense of urgency to John Maynard Keynes’s struggle for a new order, he reissued these articles in 1931 in Essays in Persuasion. One important part of Keynes’s attack focused on the theory of “perfect competition.” He argued that this theory fails to consider the destructive dimensions of intense competition, especially under conditions of chronic excess capacity such as existed in the staple export industries in this era. Keynes attributed the benign view of intense competition to the emergence of a complex set of developments in politics, philosophy, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Keynes argued that an increasing percentage of the country’s largest and most important private economic institutions were evolving toward a status that is, or could easily be made to be, equivalent for planning purposes to that of a public corporation.
