Which 1936 book is the founding text of Keynesian macroeconomics?

The 1936 book that became the founding text of Keynesian macroeconomics is The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, commonly shortened to The General Theory.

John Maynard Keynes published the book in February 1936, during the economic crisis shaped by the Great Depression. It challenged the prevailing classical view that competitive markets would naturally move toward full employment and that supply would reliably generate enough demand.

Keynes argued that employment and output could remain depressed when aggregate demand was insufficient. The book introduced or popularized ideas including the consumption function, effective demand, liquidity preference, the multiplier, and the marginal efficiency of capital. These concepts helped establish macroeconomics as a distinct field focused on economy-wide employment, output, prices, and money.

The book is often confused with Keynes’s earlier A Treatise on Money, published in 1930. The General Theory was the work that triggered the “Keynesian Revolution.” Later New Keynesian economics adapted many of its insights while combining them with neoclassical models, so modern Keynesian theory is not identical to every argument in Keynes’s original text.