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Keynes and His Critics is the thirty-sixth volume of the British Academy's Records of Social and Economic History, New Series. It is doubtful that the academy could have chosen a better collection or a better editor for the first volume in the series to cover the twentieth century.
G. C. Peden, Professor of History at the University of Stirling, has spent the better part of three decades grappling with the details of Treasury history, and in particular with the influence of Keynes on that history. The experience shows. Accented by Peden's excellent yet understated commentary, the 76 documents and document excerpts included in Keynes and His Critics take the reader from debates over Britain's return to the gold standard, through questions of how to deal with the Great Depression and finance the war, to the days of Bretton Woods and Keynes's death in 1946. They tell a tale of Treasury transformation. The Treasury of the late 1920s had fundamentally disagreed with Keynes's new ideas on the connections between loan-financed public works and unemployment; by the end of World War II, however, even the opponents of Keynes's ideas stood firmly upon his ground.
As Keynes and His Critics shows, however, transformation is a tale needing to be told carefully. It was not a simple triumph of the General Theory and a simple defeat of a pre-Depression "Treasury view." It was a nuanced tale...