vi THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT

attack, and I am not, I think, ignorant of their strongpoints.

The matters at issue are of an importance whichcannot be exaggerated. But, if my explanations areright, it is my fellow economists, not the generalpublic, whom I must first convince. At this stageof the argument the general public, though welcomeat the debate, are only eayesdroppers at an attempt byan economist to bring to an issue the deep divergencesof opinion between fellow economists which have forthe time being almost destroyed the practical influenceof economic theory, and will, until they are resolved,continue to do so.

The relation between this book and my Treatise onMoney , which I published five years ago, is probablyclearer to myself than it will be to others; and what inmy own mind is a natural evolution in a line of thoughtwhich I have been pursuing for several years, maysometimes strike the reader as a confusing change ofview. This difficulty is not made less by certainchanges in terminology which I have felt compelled tomake. These changes of language I have pointed outin the course of the following pages; but the generalrelationship between the two books can be expressedbriefly as follows. When I began to write my Treatiseon Money I was still moving along the traditional linesof regarding the influence of money as something so tospeak separate from the general theory of supply anddemand. When I finished it, I had made some pro-gress towards pushing monetary theory back to be-coming a theory of output as a whole. But my lackof emancipation from preconceived ideas showed itselfin what now seems to me to be the outstanding faultof the theoretical parts of that work (namely, Books III