The Economic Consequences of the Peace

by John Maynard Keynes CB Fba

Overview

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) is a book published by John Maynard Keynes. Keynes attended the Versailles Conference as a delegate of the British Treasury and argued for a much more generous peace. It was a best seller throughout the world and was critical in establishing a general opinion that the Versailles Treaty was a "Carthaginian peace". It helped to consolidate American public opinion against the treaty and involvement in the League of Nations. The perception by much of the British public that Germany had been treated unfairly in turn was a crucial factor in public support for appeasement. The success of the book established Keynes' reputation as a leading economist especially on the left. When Keynes was a key player in establishing the Bretton Woods system in 1944, he remembered the lessons from Versailles as well as the Great Depression. The Marshall Plan after Second World War is a similar system to that proposed by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781618951182
Publisher:	Bibliotech Press
Publication date:	09/20/2013
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	430,716
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was educated at Eton and at Kings College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1905. After a period in the India Office of the Civil Service, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in economics. During World War I he held a post at the Treasury and was selected as an economic adviser to the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He resigned that position in June of that year and wrote and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he argued against the excessive reparations required of Germany. Between the wars he was a financial adviser and a lecturer at Cambridge. His major and most revolutionary work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in 1936. Keynes played a central role in British war finance during World War II and, in 1944, was the chief British representative at the Bretton Woods Conference that established the International Monetary Fund. The transformations which Keynes brought about, both in economic theory and policy, were some of the most considerable and influential of the twentieth century, laying, in effect, the foundations for what is now macroeconomics.

Robert Lekachman was a professor of economics at Lehman College, City University of New York, and is the author of The Age of Keynes and Capitalism for Beginners.

Table of Contents

Chapter I	Introductory	1
Chapter II	Europe before the War	7
Chapter III	The Conference	24
Chapter IV	The Treaty	51
Chapter V	Reparation	103
Chapter VI	Europe after the Treaty	211
Chapter VII	Remedies	236

Editorial Reviews

"The most important economic document relating to World War I and its aftermath" —John Kenneth Galbraith

From the Publisher