Keynes' work was part of a long-running debate within economic

Keynes' work was part of a long-running debate within economics over the existence and nature of general gluts. While a number of the policies Keynes advocated (notably government deficit spending) and the theoretical ideas he proposed (effective demand, the multiplier, the paradox of thrift) were advanced by various authors in the 19th and early 20th century, Keynes's unique contribution was to provide a general theory of these, which proved acceptable to the political and economic establishments.

An intellectual precursor of Keynesian economics was underconsumption theory in classical economics, dating from such 19th century economists as Thomas Malthus, the Birmingham School of Thomas Attwood,[6] and the American economists William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, who were influential in the 1920s and 1930s. Underconsumptionists were, like Keynes after them, concerned with failure of aggregate demand to attain potential output, calling this "underconsumption" (focusing on the demand side), rather than "overproduction" (which would focus on the supply side), and advocating economic interventionism. Keynes specifically discussed underconsumption (which he wrote "under-consumption") in the General Theory, in Chapter 22, Section IV and Chapter 23, Section VII.

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