Introducción a Keynes. 6ta ed. (1965)
Keynesian thinking made a profound impression on Raúl Prebisch, as reflected in the effort he made to summarize, structure and analyse the works of Keynes, and in particular the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936.
This "introduction", which initially served a pedagogical purpose, as he believed that the works of Keynes, given the polemical context in which they were conceived, presented "obscure passages", "lack of precision in some lines of reasoning and an apparent textual disorder", was in fact the first "reader's guide" to Keynes ever published.
His zeal for publicizing the thinking of Keynes also derived from the theoretical proximity between some of Keynes's ideas and the heterodox policies to which Prebisch (and other Latin American policymakers) had been converted during the convulsions of the Great Depression of the 1930s: the interest in economic cycles and the importance of countercyclical policies, the proactive role of the State, the impact of investment and savings on growth, and the effect of "distributive justice" on aggregate demand, among other issues.
From this viewpoint, Prebisch's writing goes beyond the pedagogical interest of the university professor and is in fact a theoretical weapon to be wielded on the doctrinal battlefield. Yet it is important to recognize that Prebisch's reading of Keynes’s work is very critical, for he considered that the dynamism of industrialized countries, and consequently the applicability of Keynesian elements to Latin America, were things to be studied and not assumed.
Thus, he would write some years later: "It was in the centres themselves, submerged in the great global crisis [...] that Keynes emerged, but we in Latin America quickly discovered that Keynes's genius was not universal and that his analyses were confined to the economic phenomena of the great centres and took no account of the problems of the periphery" (Prebisch, translation by ECLAC.
Prebisch, Raúl (1965). Introducción a Keynes. 6ta ed. México, DF : Fondo de Cultura Económica.131 p. Print format available at Biblioteca Hernán Santa Cruz, ECLAC