PREFACE

This book is chiefly addressed to my fellow economists.I hope that it will be intelligible to others. But itsmain purpose is to deal with difficult questions oftheory, and only in the second place with the applica-tions of this theory to practice. For if orthodoxeconomics is at fault, the error is to be found not in thesuperstructure, which has been erected with great carefor logical consistency, but in a lack of clearness and ofgenerality in the premisses. Thus I cannot achievemy object of persuading economists to re-examinecritically certain of their basic assumptions except bya highly abstract argument and also by much contro-versy. I wish there could have been less of the latter.But I have thought it important, not only to explainmy own point of view, but also to show in what re-spects it departs from the prevailing theory. Those,who are strongly wedded to what I shall call “theclassical theory”, will fluctuate, I expect, between abelief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I amsaying nothing new. It is for others to determine ifeither of these or the third alternative is right. Mycontroversial passages are aimed at providing somematerial for an answer; and I must ask forgivenessif, in the pursuit of sharp distinctions, my con-troversy is itself too keen. I myself held withconviction for many years the theories which I now