The Reception of A Treatise on Money
Although a congratulatory letter from J. A. Schumpeter upon the publication of the Treatise said, “I believe it will ever stand out as a landmark in its field”, the professional reception of the book generally was respectful, but more critical than Schumpeter’s letter. Keynes, himself, was not really happy with the volumes although he had been seven years in the writing. The book appeared a year after the stock market crash in the United States, and that nation, as well as the rest of the industrialized world was already a fair way down the slope of recession that was to reach bottom in the U. S. in 1932–1933. The Treatise must, upon publication, have seemed vaguely out of date. Considering what the following decade was to bring in the Great Depression, it was certainly the case that policymakers would not find in the book the kind of answers that they had begun to seek ever more desperately. In the other area important to Keynes – academic economics – he was equally disappointed. Two years after publication, it was clear that the profession was not according to the ideas of the Treatise more than cursory attention. As Haberler’s treatment indicates, the Treatise made only a minor stir in the over-crowded field of business cycle theory. The book’s emphasis on the role of money and the rate of interest in determining the overall level of economic activity looked more and more to have missed the point. When scholarly criticism of the Treatise began to be heard almost literally on Keynes’s doorstep, Keynes gradually came to see the need to do more than just revise the Treatise. The result, of course, was The General Theory.