The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy

Abstract

The call to bring law closer to the economic facts has been one of the strong yeasts in the books and periodicals about law for at least a generation, but on the whole the consequences of the campaign, both in legislation and in legal thought, have been disappointing or worse. One reason for that failure, it may be, is the fact that many of those who most enthusiastically preached More Economics in Law read few books of the type reviewed here, and made no effort to read more. The result has been that much of the legal writing (and legal doing) which impinges on economic issues has remained callow in its economic outlook, and untouched by the development of postwar economic thought. The best of it is dominated by the formulae of Fabian socialism, which can no longer be defended as economic analysis in any terms; much of the rest, by crude phobias against High Finance and Cutthroat Competition which are difficult to isolate because they are rarely written down at length or in order.