It would be misleading to suppose that Keynes's activities after the publication of the Treatise were exclusively devoted to the defence or elucidation of his book. His Economic Advisory Council Paper (above pp. 178–200), written just after finishing the Treatise, indicated signs of further development. In addition, in his correspondence with Hawtrey and others Keynes made it clear that he was trying alternative lines of approach to those of the Treatise.

However, there was still a period of relative consolidation before Keynes began to work intensively on a new formulation of his ideas and to announce his intentions as clearly as he did in his June 1932 letter to Hawtrey (above p. 172) or his preface to the Japanese edition of the Treatise (JMK, vol. v, p. xxviii).

It was during this period of consolidation that the activities of the ‘Circus’ were of considerable importance. As so little documentation of its discussions survives, we print below a note on the discussions of the ‘Circus’ and their relationship to many of the papers in this volume.

THE CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS, 193O-1

Keynes completed his preface to the Treatise on 14 September 1930, the day he finished the book as a whole. The book was actually published on 31 October 1930. Within a few months of publication, however, Keynes was moving on, rethinking the fundamental equations of the Treatise and developing the whole apparatus of analysis out of which, over the next few years, the General Theory emerged.