The End of Laissez-Faire

First edition. 12mo. Pp. 54, [2]. Quarter-bound pale green cloth over blue paper covered boards; printed paper label to spine. 1/2,000 copies printed on laid paper. The last of the author's three pamphlets to be published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press – The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill (1925), and A Short View of Russia (1925), being the other two. In the U.S. it was published by New Republic in a combined edition with the latter under the title Laissez Faire and Communism.

Front board bubbled up in places, somewhat sunned to edges, corners rubbed, endpapers lightly foxed, previous owner's name to ffep, else Very Good.

A reworking of the 1924 Sidney Ball Lecture given at the University of Oxford and a lecture delivered before the University of Berlin in 1926. Being a brief historical overview of the "many different rivulets of thought and springs of feeling" which fed into the development of the laissez-faire doctrine. Though compliant with the orthodoxy that the marketplace should be free of governmental interference, Keynes suggests that the State can play a constructive role in protecting individuals from the worst excesses of capitalism's cycles, especially in regard to unemployment. A prescient work, preceding the Great Depression.

[Woolmer 97; A Change of Perspective: the letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1923–1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 282]