Possibly no book in economic theory has a more presumptuous first chapter than Keynes’s General Theory.
To be sure, other economists had proclaimed their own originality and brilliance, but Keynes did it with such force that it seemed convincing.
This lack of modesty apparently went back to Keynes’s youth.
When he took the civil service exam upon graduation from college and did not receive the top score in economics, his response was, “I evidently knew more about economics than my examiners.”
While Keynes was working on The General Theory, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw that he was writing a new book that would revolutionize the way in which the world thinks about economic problems.
The first chapter of The General Theory is one paragraph long.
Here Keynes simply states that his new theory is a general theory in the sense that previous theory is a special case to be placed within his more general framework. By “previous theory,” Keynes meant both classical and neoclassical economics, which he defined as the economics of Ricardo as it pertains to Say’s Law, and of those who followed in this belief: J. S. Mill, Marshall, Edgeworth, and Pigou.