ABSTRACT
John Maynard Keynes's first task, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was indeed to show in what sense unemployment could be involuntary. Keynes spared his readers, even in the deliberately provocative General Theory of 1936, the ultimate force of his conclusion, that rational conduct is an illusion and unrelated to the realities of business. For money, a familiar, omnipresent and indispensable feature of our economic society can have no truck at all with the timeless rational construct of value. Money, in that real society, is an asset, that is, a means of storing wealth, of preserving and conveying it through time. Money in its full nature is an idea incompatible with that of rational determinacy. Scarcely less so is imperfect competition. The dissolution of belief in the value-theory account of economic affairs was an aspect of the dissolution of Victorian social and international stability.
