[발췌: 일반이론 서문들] Prefaces to The General Theory

출처: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes, 1936)
자료: MIA(html); eBook; single PDF; Gutenberg(html) (cf. my catalog of his writings)

※ This is a reading note with excerpts taken, and personal annotations and remarks added, in trying to understand the above text. So, to see the original please visit the above source links. [일반이론 독서메모 (my reading notes of Keynes's General Theory)

※ 발췌(excerpts):

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PREFACE (to the original English edition, 13 December 1935)

This book is chiefly addressed to my fellow economists. I hope that it will be intelligible to others. But its main purpose is to deal with difficult questions in theory, and only in the second place with the applications of this theory to practice. For if orthodox economics is at fault, the error is to be found not in the superstructure, which has been erected with great care for logical consistency, but in a lack of clearness and of generality in the premisses. Thus I cannot achieve my object of persuading economists to re-examine critically certain of their basic assumptions except by a highly abstract argument and also by much controversy. I wish there could have been less of the latter. But I have thought it important, not only to explain my own point of view, but also to show in what respects it departs from the prevailing theory. Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I a saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right. My controversial passages are aimed at providing some materials for an answer; and I must ask forgiveness if, in the pursuit of sharp distinctions, my controvery is itself too keen. I myself held with conviction for many years the theories which I now attack, and I am not, I think, ignorant of their strong points.

  The matters at issue are of an importance which cannot be exaggerated. But, if my explanations are right, it is my fellow economists, not the general public, whom I must first  convince. At this stage of the argument the general public, though welcome at the debate, are only eavesdroppers at an attempt by an economist to bring to an issue the deep divergencies of opinion between fellow economists which have for the time being almost destroyed the practical influence of economic theory, and will, until they are resolved, continue to do so.

  The relation between this book and my Treatise on Money [JMK vols. v and vi], which I published five years ago, is probably clearer to myself than it will be to others; and what in my own mind is a natural evolution in a line of though which I have been pursuing for several years, may sometimes strik the reader as a confusing change of view. This difficulty is not made less by certain changes in terminology which I have felt compelled to make. These changes of language I have pointed out in the course of the following pages; but the general relationship between the two books can be expressed briefly as follows. (...)