Introduction

In studies of the great events in the economics of the interwar period, the character of R.G. Hawtrey passes frequently, but usually fleetingly, across the stage. But the parts assigned to him seem oddly at variance from one account to the next. Was he a precursor pf Keynes’s revolution, the grandparent’ in ‘the paths of errancy’ as Keynes himself put it? Or, as in the assessment of many early Keynesians, was he the unrepentant exponent of the Treasury View on the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy and of the validity of Say’s law? By keeping Hawtrey at centre stage, this book attempts to resolve this issue and to identify Hawtrey’s contribution to the development of macroeconomics.