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1 - PROLOGUE

from PART I - PREPARATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2012

John Maynard Keynes
Edited by
Elizabeth Johnson  and
Donald Moggridge
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Summary

Although his Tract on Monetary Reform represents Keynes's first published work on business fluctuations, it does not represent his first work on the subject. Beyond portions of his University lectures, his earliest work in this direction resulted in a paper presented to the Political Economy Club's meeting of 3 December 1913 at the Hotel Cecil in London. This paper appears to have been influenced by D. H. Robertson's fellowship dissertation submitted to Trinity College, which later appeared as A Study of Industrial Fluctuation in 1915, for Keynes wrote to Robertson on 28 September 1913:

‘Though I oughtn't to say so, I suppose, or breath[e] a word, I have been reading your Fellowship Dissertation. What a prodigious amount of work you managed to put into it, judging from the time it took me to master it. However I suppose we shall not be free to discuss it while it is still fresh in my mind, only after some months interval.

What I must say now is that your work has suggested to me what appears at first sight a superb theory about fluctuations, and I want very much to hear your opinion of it. I believe it synthesises an enormous number of your facts. I haven't nearly time enough to write it down, and am terrified lest I should forget it.’

This is surely the ‘reciprocal obligation’ to Robertson referred to in the passage in A Study of Industrial Fluctuation which mentions Keynes's paper and its importance in Robertson's thinking (page 171, footnote 2).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes , pp. 1 - 14
Publisher: Royal Economic Society
Print publication year: 1978

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