ABSTRACT
Keynes wrote The General Theory (1936) with both a political and a theoretical motivation. Whereas the policy dimension remained somewhat implicit, it nevertheless stands to reason that Keynes wanted his book to be more than just a theoretical work. To him, it had to serve a policy purpose – positively, a justification for government intervention in the economy and, negatively, a dismissal of wage deflation policy. His targeted readership, however, was academic, which resulted from his perception that these policy recommendations faced a theoretical hurdle. Economists, he recognised, were torn between their ‘flair and instinct’ (Keynes [1934] 1973: 486) and their analytical tools. Their flair prompted them to believe that mass unemployment resulted from a system failure and was to be corrected accordingly, whereas their theoretical reasoning compelled them to trace it back to wage-earners’ unwillingness to accept a fall in wages.1
