Conclusion

Summary

Keynes wrote this at the height of the Great Depression. Demonstrating the combination of radical intellectualism and political reformism that characterised his writings and professional life, Keynes was trying to avoid the ‘two opposed errors of pessimism’, he thought the Depression had induced ‘the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments’. By way of countering these ‘errors’, he looked one hundred years into the future, toward a time when ‘the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution’. The economic problem, Keynes forcefully argued, was not ‘the permanent problem of the human race’.