John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge in 1883, son of John Neville Keynes, later registrary of the university; his mother was one of the earliest women students. Educated at Eton and King's, he passed into the Civil Service in 1906, working for three years in the India Office. He returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of King's in 1909 and remained a Fellow until his death.
Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914 he was called to the Treasury. Over the next four years his ability and his immense capacity for work took him to the top. By 1919 he was principal Treasury representative at the Peace Conference at Versailles. His passionate disagreement with decisions regarding reparations led to his resignation and the writing of The Economic Consequences of the Peace. From then on, Keynes was a national figure, in the centre of every economic argument and the author of countless 'Keynes Plans' to solve one problem after another.
In 1936 he published the most provocative book written by any economist of his generation. The General Theory, as it is known to all economists, cut through all the Gordian knots of pre-Keynesian discussion of the trade cycle and propounded a new approach to the determination of the level of economic activity, the problems of employment and unemployment, the causes of inflation, the strategies of budgetary policy. Arguments about the book continued until his death in 1946 and still continue today. Despite all that has been written in the subsequent quarter of a century, Keynes and his book still represent the turning-point between the old economics and the new from which each generation of economists needs to take its inspiration and its point of departure towards fresh attempts to carry his work further.
This new edition provides a complete version of the original text, corrected in the light of subsequent correspondence. It also brings together all of Keynes's prefaces to subsequent foreign translations and prints as appendixes two articles by Keynes, making minor modifications of views set forth in the text.