16 THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT BK. I

as “full” employment, both “frictional” and “volun-tary” unemployment being consistent with “full” em-ployment thus defined. This fits in, we shall find, withother characteristics of the classical theory, which isbest regarded as a theory of distribution in conditionsof full employment. So long as the classical postulateshold good, unemployment, which is in the above senseinvoluntary, cannot occur. Apparent unemploymentmust, therefore, be the result either of temporary lossof work of the “between jobs” type or of intermittentdemand for highly specialised resources or of the effectof a trade union “closed shop” on the employment offree labour. Thus writers in the classical tradition,overlooking the special assumption underlying theirtheory, have been driven inevitably to the conclusion,perfectly logical on their assumption, that apparent un-employment (apart from the admitted exceptions) mustbe due at bottom to a refusal by the unemployed factorsto accept a reward which corresponds to their marginalproductivity. A classical economist may sympathisewith labour in refusing to accept a cut in its money-wage, and he will admit that it may not be wise to makeit to meet conditions which are temporary; but scien-tific integrity forces him to declare that this refusal is,nevertheless, at the bottom of the trouble.

Obviously, however, if the classical theory is onlyapplicable to the case of full employment, it is fallaciousto apply it to the problems of involuntary unemploy-ment—if there be such a thing (and who will deny it?).The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometersin a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in ex-perience straight lines apparently parallel often meet,rebuke the lines for not keeping straight—as the onlyremedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occur-ring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except tothrow over the axiom of parallels and to work out anon-Euclidean geometry. Something similar is re-quired to-day in economics. We need to throw over