Interest has a title role in many pre-Keynesian writings as it does in Keynes’s own General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Eugen Böhm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest (1889), Knut Wicksell’s Interest and Prices (1898), and Gustav Cassel’s The Nature and Necessity of Interest (1903) readily come to mind. The essays in F.A. Hayek’s Profits, Interest, and Investment (1939), which both predate and postdate Keynes’s book, focus on the critical role that interest rates play in coordinating production plans with consumption preferences. The General Theory represents a significant departure from classical (and Austrian) thinking but not because of the title-role status of interest. Rather, the departure stems from the fact that, in Keynesian theory, the

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