The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936.
Written by British economist John Maynard Keynes, the book appeared in February 1936 through Macmillan in London. It was developed during the aftermath of the Great Depression, when persistent unemployment challenged the classical belief that competitive markets naturally tend toward full employment.
Keynes argued that total spending, or aggregate demand, could be insufficient to sustain full employment. His analysis emphasized consumption, investment, expectations, liquidity preference, and the possibility of involuntary unemployment. The book helped establish macroeconomics as a distinct central field and provided intellectual support for countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies.
A common mix-up is to choose 1929, the year associated with the Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression in many accounts. The book came later, after Keynes had spent years revising ideas developed in his 1930 Treatise on Money. Its publication is commonly linked to the “Keynesian Revolution,” although economists have continued to debate and reinterpret its arguments.