PREFACE TO THE JAPANESE EDITION
Alfred Marshall, on whose Principles of Economics all
contemporary English economists have been brought up, was at
particular pains to emphasise the continuity of his thought with
Ricardo's. His work largely consisted in grafting the marginal
principle and the principle of substitution on to the Ricardian
tradition; and his theory of output and consumption as a whole,
as distinct from his theory of the production and distribution of
a given output, was never separately expounded. Whether he
himself felt the need of such a theory, I am not sure. But his
immediate successors and followers have certainly dispensed with
it and have not, apparently, felt the lack of it. It was in this
atmosphere that I was brought up. I taught these doctrines myself
and it is only within the last decade that I have been conscious
of their insufficiency. In my own thought and development,
therefore, this book represents a reaction, a transition away
from the English classical (or orthodox) tradition. My emphasis
upon this in the following pages and upon the points of my
divergence from received doctrine has been regarded in some
quarters in England as unduly controversial. But how can one
brought up in English economic orthodoxy, indeed a priest of that
faith at one time, avoid some controversial emphasis, when he
first becomes a Protestant?
Perhaps Japanese readers, however, will neither require nor
resist my assaults against the English tradition. We are well
aware of the large scale on which English economic writings are
read in Japan, but we are not so well informed as to how Japanese
opinions regard them. The recent praiseworthy enterprise on the
part of the International Economic Circle of Tokyo in reprinting
Malthus's 'Principles of Political Economy' as the first volume
in the Tokyo Series of Reprints encourages me to think that a
book which traces its descent from Malthus rather than Ricardo
may be received with sympathy in some quarters at least.
At any rate I am grateful to the Oriental Economist for making
it possible for me to approach Japanese readers without the extra
handicap of a foreign language.
J. M. KEYNES
4 December 1936