Abstract
During the last fifteen years one of the minor growth industries in British economics has been the nature, timing and existence of a Keynesian revolution in British economic policy. The subject has spawned a reasonable literature — one sufficiently large that the Economic History Society has devoted one of its “Studies in Economic and Social History” to introduce students and their teachers to the scholarship in the field (Peden, 1988). However, this work has evolved in a fashion that ignores crucial steps in analysis and has ambiguities as to the subject under discussion. It seems useful to examine it again.
The Treasury is like nature itself, Expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.
(Arthur Steel-Maitland, quoted in Clarke, 1988, p. 56)1
It seems useless to endeavour to follow professional economic teaching, for there is no criterion for determining the proper economist to follow, and, whoever one chooses, one is apt to find oneself led into actions which are either repugnant to commonsense or incapable of achievement.
(Sir Richard Hopkins, quoted in Howson, 1975, p. 91)
[U]ntil there is wider agreement among economists, the personal ‘authority’ of individual economists is of some significance. At present I think that most of us defer to your crowd [the Economic Section] individually rather than as a mechanism.
(PRO T230/283, Sir Wilfird Eady to Lionel Robbins, 9 March 1943)
University of Toronto. I should like to thank, with the usual disclaimer, Susan Howson and Michael Beenstock for comments on earlier drafts.
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© 1993 Haim Barkai, Stanley Fischer and Nissan Liviatan
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Moggridge, D.E. (1993). From Theory to Policy: The “Keynesian Revolution” in Britain. In: Barkai, H., Fischer, S., Liviatan, N. (eds) Monetary Theory and Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12535-7_7
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