ABSTRACT
One of the aims of this book is to show that at the root of modern macroeconomics there is a contrast between two basic paradigms. One is Hicks’s ‘pure theory’, the other is developed in Keynes’s General Theory. The existence of this contrast is confirmed by Keynes’s rather negative comment on Value and Capital:
I have now finished reading Hicks’s book. I don’t think I have ever read a book by an obviously clever man, so free from points open to specific criticism, which was so utterly empty. I do not, at the end, feel a penny the wiser about anything. He seemed able to decant the most interesting subjects of all their contents, and to produce something so thin and innocuous as to be almost meaningless, and without mistakes. But about nothing whatever. Simple things are made to appear very difficult and complicated, and the emptiest platitudes paraded as generalizations of vast import. A most queer book.
