February is a highly anticipated month as the Indian government tables the Union Budget in Parliament. This year marks the 90th anniversary of a book whose ideas broadly lays the economic foundations of every Union Budget, titled The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and written by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. It was published in February 1936.

General Theory was written during highly uncertain times—the inter-war period and the Great Depression. Keynes was already famous, both as an author and as an economic thinker. In 1920, he wrote the highly acclaimed The Economic Consequences of the Peace, criticising western powers for putting the blame of the First World War squarely on Germany. It was followed by A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923, where he advised the Bank of England on monetary policy. In 1925, he chastised Winston Churchill for going back to the Gold Standard. In 1930, Keynes wrote A Treatise on Money, where he discussed how savings and investments could lead to recessions.

Keynes’s earlier books were targeted at a general audience and the policy world. General Theory was written specifically for “fellow economists” with the hope that it was also “intelligible to others”. In the opening chapter, Keynes points that the book was thus titled to contrast it with the classical theory, which emerged from the works of Adam Smith........

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