Throughout his working life from 1919 onwards Keynes contributed to the stimulation of economic thought and argument not only in articles in the learned journals and in letters to the newspapers but also, and perhaps most effectively, in pamphlets. His contemporaries and pupils remember some of these—and notably The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, The End of Laissez-Faire, The Means to Prosperity, and How to Pay for the War—more vividly than almost anything else that he wrote.

Their republication has presented something of a dilemma. He himself collected his earliest writings of this character in 1931 in a volume which he called Essays in Persuasion, which has sold through many printings in subsequent years and has acquired a fame and identity of its own. For this small volume, intended for a popular audience, he took extracts from some of his books and abbreviated most of the pamphlets that he included. His method, as he described it in his Preface, was ‘to omit freely (without special indications in the text) anything which appeared to be redundant or unnecessary to the main line of the argument or to have lost interest with the passage of events’. In any complete collection of his writings, however, it is obviously desirable that the pamphlets shall somewhere be available in full and as originally written.

Both to reprint Essays in Persuasion and also to duplicate a large part of it in a reprinting of the full text of the pamphlets was an obviously unsatisfactory solution.