I. Radical, Teacher, Technician

The decade of the 1930s, extending a year or two into the one following, brought three books on economics that deeply challenged traditional economic attitudes and policies. The foremost, of course, was John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936. This accorded to the state the responsibility for the overall or macroeconomic performance of the economy, a responsibility eventually assumed by governments of all political complexions and never more ardently than in our own time by that of President Ronald Reagan.

The other greatly innovative work of the Thirties was The Modern Corporation and Private Property, by Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, first published in 1933 and again, like the work of Keynes, to have major and astonishing conservative resonance. As liberals initiate, it is clear that conservatives affirm.

JG

About the Author

John Kenneth Galbraith

The decade of the 1930s, extending a year or two into the one following, brought three books on economics that deeply challenged traditional economic attitudes and policies. The foremost, of course, was John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936. This accorded to the state the responsibility for the overall or macroeconomic performance of the economy, a responsibility eventually assumed by governments of all political complexions and never more ardently than in our own time by that of President Ronald Reagan.

The other greatly innovative work of the Thirties was The Modern Corporation and Private Property, by Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, first published in 1933 and again, like the work of Keynes, to have major and astonishing conservative resonance. As liberals initiate, it is clear that conservatives affirm.