Re:
>> Perry Mehrling: "  Who first ...pretend that all 
>> was darkness before Keynes brought light?
> >
> E. Roy Weintraub:
> 1: Keynes ...

Absolutely right!
See: John Maynard Keynes,
"The reaction of imports on exports",
_The New Statesman and Nation_,
1931, 11 April, quoted from JMK, XX, p.506

 > Is it that economics is a queer subject or in a
> queer state? Whatever may be the reason, new
> paths of thought have no appeal to the
> fundamentalists of free trade. They have been
> forcing me to chew over again a lot of stale
> mutton, dragging me along a route I have known
> all about as long as I have known anything,
> which cannot, as I have discovered by many
> attempts, lead one to a solution of our present
> difficulties-a peregrination of the catacombs
> with a guttering candle.

(Some of this passage Keynes' biographer Robert Skidelsky can recite by
heart.)

But any historian of economic thought who believes that this is
overdramatization should read the context, i.e. the actual arguments put
forward in the debate Keynes referred to. It is unbelievable nowadays how
little knowledge there was about effective demand when the Great Depression
just unfolded. 

> Sir William [later Lord] Beveridge, in the
> _Times_ newspaper, has produced the doctrine in
> its full purity, asserting that it makes no
> difference to employment in this country whether
> I buy an American car or a British car ...
> (Keynes, loc.cit).

The master mind behind much of this nonsensical advice was Edwin Cannan, by
then emeritus, but still very influential and 1932-34 President of the Royal
Economic Society. See, e.g. his
"The Problem of Unemployment" 
_Economic Journal_; 1930,vol.40; pp.45-55
 (Review article of _The Post-war Unemployment Problem_ by Henry
	Clay, London, 1929), p.54:

> The only object of exporting is to buy imports
> with the money for which the exports are sold,
> and if some export trades disappear or shrink,
> some trades supplying home consumption will come
> into being or expand because they will produce
> goods to take the place of some that were
> previously imported. The protectionist will see
> what he is always clamouring for -- production
> at home of things formerly imported -- though he
> will not have the satisfaction of attributing it
> to his nostrum of protection, and will be
> puzzled to find it resulting from what he
> regards as disastrous, a falling off of exports.

Michael Ambrosi