As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

《货币论(第1卷)》的第三篇和第四篇中，提出了一种货币理论基本问题的新研究法。这样做的目的是要找出一种方法，不但可以用来描述静态平衡的性质，而且可以用来描述不平衡的性质，同时还要发现货币体系从一种平衡状态过渡到另一种平衡状态的动力规律。这就是《货币论(第1卷)》上卷关于“货币的纯理论”中的主体。在下卷关于“货币的应用理论”中，将质的方法和量的方法结合起来，对于所讨论的量值的量级尽可能地善加估计，所根据的主要是英国和美国现存事实。