The book on this list that comes closest to doing honest work against Western economics, and the usual charge does not stick.
Irina Osadchaya does not condemn Keynes from a safe distance or relay his arguments at second hand. She reads him in the original, follows the neo-Keynesians and the post-Keynesians through their actual models, tracks Friedman's monetarist counter-attack equation by equation, and arrives at a diagnosis of the crisis of Keynesian policy that events had already begun to confirm. On its own subject - the failure of the postwar capitalist consensus - this is a serious book by a serious economist.
Its structure follows that failure: Keynes himself, the neoclassical synthesis and its breakdown, the post-Keynesian challenge from Cambridge, and monetarism's rise.
Unusually, it was revised forward into its own moment rather than reprinted stale. Osadchaya says in her foreword that this is a substantially rewritten and enlarged version of an earlier book of about 1978, with two wholly new parts - one on post-Keynesianism, one rewritten in the light of the experience of the 1970s - along with a new treatment of monetarism and a new account of the collapse of the synthesis. It names Reagan's conservative policy and carries citations into 1982.
Which puts it at the hinge of the century's economic history.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the one economy the book never turns its instruments upon.
