Keynes and His Critics is the thirty-sixth volume of the British Academy's Records of Social and Economic History, New Series. It is doubtful that the academy could have chosen a better collection or a better editor for the first volume in the series to cover the twentieth century.

G. C. Peden, Professor of History at the University of Stirling, has spent the better part of three decades grappling with the details of Treasury history, and in particular with the influence of Keynes on that history. The experience shows. Accented by Peden's excellent yet understated commentary, the 76 documents and document excerpts included in Keynes and His Critics take the reader from debates over Britain's return to the gold standard, through questions of how to deal with the Great Depression and finance the war, to the days of Bretton Woods and Keynes's death in 1946. They tell a tale of Treasury transformation. The Treasury of the late 1920s had fundamentally disagreed with Keynes's new ideas on the connections between loan-financed public works and unemployment; by the end of World War II, however, even the opponents of Keynes's ideas stood firmly upon his ground.

As Keynes and His Critics shows, however, transformation is a tale needing to be told carefully. It was not a simple triumph of the General Theory and a simple defeat of a pre-Depression “Treasury view.” It was a nuanced tale of Ralph Hawtrey, director of financial enquiries, struggling in 1929 with the Treatise on Money even as he anticipated the idea of the multiplier (pp. 62, 89–91), and of Hawtrey and other Treasury bureaucrats educating Keynes even as he educated them about liquidity preference. It was a tale of Richard Hopkins who, as controller of finance and supply services in 1929, stood firmly with fellow controllers Otto Niemeyer and Frederick Leith-Ross on classical ground and viewed Keynes as a “currency heretic” (p. 53), but who, as permanent secretary between 1942 and 1945, had become a willing advocate of Hugh Dalton's cheap money policies (pp. 344–54). It was a tale of a Hopkins who, even though his own policy preferences had been transformed, still had to compete regularly for the Chancellor's attention with Wilfrid Eady and H. D. Henderson on issues of capital budgeting and deficit finance. The transformation of Treasury was not so much the triumph of Keynesian policies as it was a transformation of the questions to be asked during the formulation of those policies. Treasury's answers still resisted Keynes in 1945; the questions they asked, however, did not.

Keynes and His Critics is worth the investment just for its tale of Treasury. Yet the book's value extends far beyond its story of bright, clever, and articulate Treasury officials whose names have fallen unremembered by most. It illuminates Keynes himself. By editorial design Keynes appears only indirectly, when reflected in the eyes of Treasury under-secretaries and controllers. Nonetheless, one regularly sees here not only the transformation of under-secretaries, but also how Keynes' own ideas changed from the Treatise on Money through the General Theory to Bretton Woods. And because Peden provides no shortage of footnotes and cross-references to the thirty volumes of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (E. Johnson and D. Moggridge, eds., 1971–89), together with a very good bibliography, one knows where to look when the inevitable “Did Keynes really say that?” questions arise.

Keynes and His Critics is not just for graduate students and specialists in the history of Keynes and Keynesian policy. It is the kind of book everyone who teaches undergraduate macroeconomics should spend time with. Consider the decades' worth of American undergraduates who have grown up to become leading journalists, politicians, and business executives: these policy-makers were weaned upon stylized versions of “classical” and “Keynesian” theories that relegated “international trade” and “open economy” chapters to a hurried end-of-semester survey, versions that suggest that the essence of Keynesianism and its alternatives can be captured by closed-world stories. Yet, as Keynes and His Critics makes clear, neither Keynes nor his critics argued anything approaching the stylized position. With the possible exception of chapter 6, which focuses upon specific responses to the General Theory, Keynes and His Critics provides a chronicle of competing open-economy visions.

As with any publication of “selected” documents, questions arise of the “Why include this and not that?” sort. One wonders, for example, whether there are no documents between July 1925 and August 1928 worthy of inclusion. More significantly, why are there no documents for the three years between April 1933 and March 1936? Is the absence of talk about trade and foreign loans in the documents of chapter six simply an artifact of that chapter's focus on reactions to The General Theory, or was it the result of changes at Treasury during the intervening years?

Yet in the end these are mere quibbles. Peden has performed a great service for scholars and teachers with Keynes and His Critics. Scholars interested in the evolution of ideas, in the tension between intellectual innovation and the constraints of administration, in how civil servants deal differently with new ideas in the midst of a major crisis like the Great Depression or World War II, will all find the book valuable. And so will all who teach macroeconomics or macroeconomic history and wish their students to grow up and approach policy questions carefully. I am neither a fan of Keynesianism nor a fan of bureaucrats; but after spending time with Hawtrey, Hopkins, et al., I can safely say I will be teaching the economics of both differently.