A Note on Books
There must be hundreds of economic books that may be variously described as Keynesian, Pro-Keynesian,
Quasi-Keynesian, Semi-Keynesian, or Post-Keynesian, and there must be thousands of such pamphlets
and Articles, but there is a great dearth when we come to any literature since 1936
that may be described as definitely anti-Keynesian, in the sense that it is explicitly and consistently
critical of the major Keynesian doctrines.
In the works of such writers as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Frank
H. Knight, Jacques Ref, and others, we do indeed have an impressive non-Keynesian literature
based on neo-classical premises, with occasional explicit criticism of Keynesian tenets, but
Full-length books exclusively devoted to a critical analysis of Keynesianism may be
counted on the fingers of one hand.
First among them I should like to mention L. Albert Hahn's The Economics of Illusion,
a collection of essays originally published separately on various Keynesian themes.
The same author's Common Sense Economics is mainly devoted to developing a unified constructive
doctrine, but involves explicit as well as implied criticism of Keynesian doctrine.
A small volume by V. Orville Watts, Away from Freedom, especially emphasizes the moral and
political weaknesses of Keynesianism.
And not even the shortest anti-Keynesian bibliography should omit Arthur W. Marger's monumental
study The Theory of Prices, two volumes, 1,426 pages.
This work is distinguished both for its penetrating comment and for the immense range of its scholarship,
but its relentless prolixity and disheartening length have caused it to miss the influence
it might otherwise have had.
Not until I had finished the present book did I have the good fortune, through his generosity,
to spend an hour over the manuscript of a work in preparation by W. H. Hutt, now Dean
Dean of the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
This will be both a thorough and a thoroughly admirable work, which I am convinced will
make a deep impression when it appears.
Meanwhile, I feel encouraged and corroborated in my own analysis by the numerous points
David McCord Wright, Dow Professor of Economics and Political Science at McGill University,
Montreal, is now also engaged, I am informed, on a book on the Keynesian system.
Starting from his article, Mr. Keynes and the Day of Judgment, which appeared in Science
of November 21, 1958, this book will throw much added light on the problems with which
it deals.
Individual volumes have appeared devoted to criticism of single aspects of Keynesian doctrine.
Among these, W. H. Hutz, The Theory of Idle Resources and George Turbors, The Bogie of
Economic Maturity are outstanding. Milton Friedman has devoted a critical and careful
study to The Theory of the Consumption Function, and Ernst W. Swanson and Emerson P. Schmidt
and Economic Stagnation or Progress have written a critique of doctrines on the mature economy,
over savings and deficit spending.
But much of the best critical analysis of Keynesian doctrines has appeared merely in
individual chapters in a few pages of works by such writers as Benjamin M. Anderson, Arthur
F. Burns, Philip Courtney, Gottfried Haberler, F. A. Hayek, Frank H. Knight, Ludwig von Mises,
Melchior Pauli, Charles Rist, Wilhelm Repke and others, and in widely scattered articles
Mainly in Learned Journals by Harry Gunnison Brown, W. H. Hutt, Frank H. Knight, L. M.
Lachman, Joseph Stagg Lawrence, Etienne Manteau, only in French, Franco Modigliani, Edwin G.
Norse, Melchior Pauli, Jacques Reff, Jacob Weiner, R. Gordon Wasson, John H. Williams,
David McCord Wright, and others.
These articles would have a far greater impact on current thought than they have had if they
could be collected and made readily available between the covers of a single book.
I have not mentioned any pro-Keynesian literature because it is so vast and so easily available.
But Seymour Harris appends a bibliographic note to his laudatory book on John Maynard
Keynes, Economist and Policymaker, in which he lists seventeen volumes, mainly sympathetic,
of which I should especially like to mention Dudley Dillard's The Economics of John Maynard
Keynes and Elvin H. Hanson's A Guide to Keynes because they are so much better organized
and so much more lucid than the general theory itself.