ABSTRACT

Published on 4 February 1936, The General Theory raised the abundant dust Keynes had told Roy Harrod he wanted. Keynes's combative intentions were part of a long-pondered strategy, as he had indicated to Harrod. The two major debates took place in the two centers of Anglo-Saxon economics, in Keynes's Economic Journal from March 1937 to June 1938 and in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of Harvard, in that other Cambridge, in the issues of November 1936 and February 1937. The American exercise ended with Keynes's important statement, "The General Theory of Employment," a month before the Economic Journal carried its first article. In defense, always ready to go over into attack, Keynes employed a flexible strategy adjusting itself economically to need. In dealing with Hubert Henderson he had adopted a laissez-faire attitude as far as the considerable public reached by The Spectator was concerned, but, resisted him aggressively within the supportive university family as his home base.