[Keynes and Modern Macroeconomics]1

In a history of economic analysis, it is from the standpoint of modern macroeconomics that we must look upon the greatest literary success of our epoch, J. M. Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), and it is from this standpoint only that we can attempt to do justice to it. From any other view, this inevitably spells injustice. Like most of the great economists whose messages reached the general public, especially like A. Smith, Lord Keynes was much else besides being a worker in the field of economic analysis. He was a forceful and dauntless leader of public opinion, a wise adviser to his country—the England that was born in the First World War and that afterwards kept, with deepening lines, the social physiognomy then acquired—and a successful representative of her interest, a man who would have conquered a place in history even if he had never done a stroke of specifically scientific work: he would still have been the man who wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), bursting into international fame when men of equal insight but less courage and men of equal courage but less insight kept silent. ²