The End of Laissez-Faire.

London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,, 1926. First edition, first impression, of this slim volume based on Keynes's Sidney Ball lecture delivered at Oxford in 1924, as well as a rewritten version given at Berlin in 1926. It offers an historical analysis of laissez-faire economic systems and the reasons they are impractical for modern societies. "Keynes's epitaph for laissez-faire is a revealing and neglected pamphlet that documents his early conversion to the idea of a managed economy. He was interested in 'possible improvements in the techniques of western capitalism by the agency of collective action.' He admitted that 'material progress between 1750 and 1850 came from individual initiative, and owed almost nothing to the direct influence of organised society as a whole,' and that 'Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised as powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and through them, the events of history.' Nevertheless, he rejected the general principles of laissez-faire and recommended a formidable extension of the agenda of government" (Hartwell, pp. 12ff). Octavo. Original green quarter cloth, printed spine label, blue paper-covered sides. Early bookplate of Cheltenham College to front pastedown. Spine a little rubbed, slight wear to tips, contents a little spotted with a few minor pencil annotations. A good copy. Moggridge C.6; Woolmer 97. Ronald Max Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, 1995.