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Michel De Vroey, Involuntary Unemployment: The Elusive Quest for a Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) pp. xv, 296 $140, ISBN0-415-08074-6

According to Bernard Corry (1996) the distinction between voluntary and involuntary unemployment originated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century but did not come into common usage until the twentieth century. Although at Cambridge University, both Pigou and Robertson certainly made use of the concept of involuntary unemployment prior to Keynes, it was the latter, in his General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), who first attempted to highlight the involuntary nature of unemployment due to aggregate demand failure. During the era of the neoclassical synthesis (approximately from Hicks to Lucas, 1937-1972) the use and general acceptance of the idea of involuntary unemployment was widespread. However, as Table 1 indicates, the concept of involuntary unemployment has gradually disappeared from both mainstream textbooks and the macroeconomics research agenda. In this scholarly new book, Michel De Vroey recounts and ponders this demise, asking whether the abandonment of the concept of involuntary unemployment is the manifestation of some inner defect of recent economic theory or is rather due to some intrinsic weakness of the concept itself, which makes it of little use when it comes to economic theorizing. The lessons from the history of economic thought teach us that one of the main driving forces behind the evolution of new ideas is the march of events. The Great Depression gave birth to modern macroeconomics, because before 1936 macroeconomics consisted of an “intellectual witches brew: many ingredients, some of them exotic, many insights, but also a great deal of confusion” (Blanchard 2000). Although Keynes was a staunch defender of the capitalist system against all known alternative forms of economic organization, he also believed that it had some outstanding and potentially fatal weaknesses. In particular, he observed that it “seems capable of remaining in a chronic condition of sub-normal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency towards recovery or towards complete collapse” (Keynes 1936, p. 249). This is what many economists have interpreted as Keynes’s argument that involuntary unemployment can persist as an equilibrium phenomena. Thus Keynes’s notion of involuntary unemployment was undoubtedly a key idea in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). In order to disentangle these issues, DeVroey critically reviews the different explanations of involuntary unemployment that have been offered from Keynes up to the end of the 1980s. After considering The General Theory, the author studies the works of pioneering macroeconomists such as Hicks, Modigliani, Lange, Leontief, Tobin, Klein, and Hansen. An examination of the “re-appraisal of Keynes” and of the so-called disequilibrium school is followed by a discussion of Friedman’s and Lucas’s anti-Keynesian attack. The final part of the book investigates a series of models purporting to revive the Keynesian project, namely implicit contract, efficiency wages, insider-outsider, coordination failures, and imperfect competition.