A Disequilibrium View

In his preface to The General Theory Keynes agonized over his ‘long struggle to escape … from habitual modes of thought and expression’. The difficulty, he said, ‘lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds’. It was the conventional wisdom of his time that Keynes attacked. Its inability to correct economic dysfunction, coupled with the heroic attempts of its defenders to shelter it from criticism, had led to what Keynes observed to be ‘deep divergences of opinion’ among the professional economists of his time.