ABSTRACT
In the literature of economic thought there are two major turning points: one marked by the publication of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, the other by the appearance of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936. More by design than by accident, each of these works initiated an intellectual revolution which profoundly influenced the subsequent course of human affairs and led to a dramatic reinterpretation of the past. Smith deliberately set out to discredit the doctrines and policies of his predecessors, the proponents of the so-called ‘mercantile system’, while Keynes vigorously attacked an intellectual tradition which, he claimed, had ‘conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain’.1
