Abstract
In his 1924 Ball Lecture at Oxford, Maynard Keynes announced that, finally, the end of laissez-faire was close at hand: For more than a hundred years our philosophers ruled us because, by a miracle, they nearly all agreed or seemed to agree on this one thing [i.e., laissez-faire]. We do not dance even yet to a new tune. But a change is in the air. The General Theory was still more than a decade away; indeed, A Tract on Monetary Reform and its extended version, A Treatise on Money, had seemed to confirm Keyness place in the laissez-faireoriented Cambridge tradition. Yet Keynes was already prepared to turn away from the classical tradition of Smith, Mill, Marshall, and Pigou and champion the end of laissez-faire.
Ross B. Emmett, "Keynes on Judgment, Moral Science, and the Civilization of the Few," Journal of Markets & Morality 20, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 69-78