Essays in Persuasion

By John Maynard Keynes

Book Overview

In the light of subsequent history, Essays in Persuasion is a remarkably prophetic volume covering a wide range of issues in political economy. In articles on the Versailles Treaty. John Maynard Keynes foresaw all too clearly that excessive Allied demands for reparations and indemnities would lead to the economic collapse of Germany. In Keynes's essays on inflation and deflation, the reader can find ideas that were to become the foundations of his most renowned treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). With startling accuracy Keynes forecast the economic fluctuations that were to beset the economies of Europe and the United States and even proposed measures which, if heeded at the time, might have warded off an era of world-wide depression. His views on Soviet Russia, on the decline of laissez-faire, and the possibilities of economic growth are as relevant today as when Keynes originally set them forth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393001903
• ISBN13: 9780393001907
• Release Date: January 1963
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Crash course in economics

Essays in Persuasion are a collection of articles and public letters published by Keynes in the 1920s and 30s. They treat mostly of economic subjects, beginning with the Versailles reparations and moving on to monetary manners, especially the return to gold, though the last fifth of the book is dedicated to political discussion (Keynes's view of Communism, the Liberal Party, hopes for a new culture in a future world of abundance...)...

Appropriate today

It is eye-opening to read original essays by John Maynard Keynes, a person whose economic philosophy was criticized for many years, but it turns out that philosophy is applicable to today's economic problems. He writes with a casual style, so not hard to understand.

Nectar and Ambrosia for the Liberal Economist

To the interested layperson John Mayanrd Keynes is known as a villain/genius responsible for the theory of governmental deficit spending in a time of economic crises. This book in a concise and understandable manner, without recourse to ponderous mathematical formulas, makes a very convincing case for the necessity of governmental intervention. When people are unwilling to spend and are hoarding cash, it is up to government...

When conservatives could still face socialism eye-to-eye.

Writing during the nineteen twenties and thirties, when the specter of socialism didn't yet haunt the Anglo-Saxon ruling elites, Keynes didn't feel his duty to sing eulogies to the free market; on the contrary, he felt his duty as an economist to propose ways through which modern society could supersede the "centrality of the money motive". The essays devoted to problems of politics in this collection, specially "A short view...

Exquisite mandarin prose and clear argument

John Maynard Keynes at his most beguiling. A series of essays that have not lost their power despite the passage of 70 years or so. As a prose stylist Maynard Keynes could equal his friends Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, and he does so in this volume. Perhaps the apogee of essay writing of the Oxford/Cambridge type, this volume has a charm that is absent from his longer works (General Theory, Tract on Monetary Reform,...