ABSTRACT
This book has been all about Keynes’s doctrines, and what American experience during the second half of the twentieth century has revealed about the accuracy of his diagnoses and the effectiveness of his remedies. This has meant jumping ahead in time. I shall now backtrack to the period before World War Two, when many people – academics, bankers, Treasury bureaucrats and politicians in Britain and other countries – first confronted Keynes’s unorthodoxy. What sort of person was the economist who produced these startling ideas? How did he persuade important people to take him seriously?
