ABSTRACT
Keynes's theorizing from 1930 to 1936—from Treatise on Money to General Theory—begins with the precisely destructive criticism of the first, continues with the blindingly genial construction of the second, and secures its new conception with more criticism, precisely constructive. Most of the specific General Theory concepts were commonplace in the history of economic thought. Indeed all great ideas are compounded of many known components, thus the Copernican system and Newton's vaster conception, and the relaying of economic thought successively by the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, the marginalists, Lon Walras, and Alfred Marshall. Keynes's set of eight lectures had been entitled "The Pure Theory of Money" through the fall of 1929, when he interrupted the series during his period of intense involvement with policy-making in 1929–1931. Keynes argued that the investment-saving equality, which he assumed, vitiated the use by neoclassical interest theory of supply-and-demand reasoning to determine the interest rate.
