A Treatise on Money. In Two Volumes. Volume I, The Pure Theory of Money. [-Volume II, The Applied Theory of Money.]

Bookseller Notes

'The first of Keynes's two major contributions to economic theory, A Treatise on Money, was published on 24 October 1930. The Treatise was the product of a long intellectual struggle to escape from the ideas in which he had been reared, later dubbed 'classical economics'; for example, the Ricardian view that supply creates its own demand. The focus of the book was on money and prices rather than on output and employment: it contained a full study of the operation of the monetary system, national and international. Fluctuations in prices were no longer explained in terms of changes in the stock of money as in the quantity theory, but in terms of the pressure of demand on the available supply of resources; and the pressure of demand was represented as varying with the magnitude of any divergence between the volume of investment and the availability of savings to finance it. The significance attached by Keynes to such a divergence reflected the success of Dennis Robertson (on whose ideas Keynes drew heavily in the years of the Treatise) in convincing Keynes that the major fluctuations in activity originated in booms in investment and that these could not be accounted for solely in terms of banking policy' (Alec Cairncross in ODNB).