Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Inter-war Literature on Money, the Cycle, and Unemployment

This book is about the emergence, during the inter-war years, of what came to be called "Keynesian macroeconomics." It accepts the novelty of that formulation, as represented by the IS-LM model, which in various forms came to dominate the subdiscipline for three decades. It argues, however, that the IS-LM model did not represent a radical change in economic thinking, but rather was an extremely selective synthesis of themes which had permeated the preceding literature, including Keynes's own contributions to it, not least the General Theory. Hence the book questions the appropriateness of thinking of that development as the outcome of a "Keynesian revolution" in economic thought, partly because the most radical aspects of Keynes's own intended contribution were excluded from it, but mainly because IS-LM is better viewed as the end result of twenty years or more of intellectual development to which many others besides Keynes contributed.