Knights’ Moves

Peter Clarke

  • Keynes and His Critics: Treasury Responses to the Keynesian Revolution 1925-46 edited by G.C. Peden
    Oxford, 372 pp, £45.00, December 2004, ISBN 0 19 726322 4

The Institute of Economic Affairs is approaching its 50th birthday, and has much to celebrate. It was founded in the heyday of the so-called Keynesian consensus that dominated British political economy for about thirty years after World War Two. The mission of the IEA was to challenge that consensus through an intellectual assault on its foundations and to proselytise instead for free-market remedies. This looked like an uphill struggle at the time. Keynesian economics seemed to have carried the day not only in the universities but in Whitehall, whichever party was in power. Harold Macmillan was on the verge of a long premiership, during which he often reaffirmed his fealty not only as Keynes’s publisher but as his disciple.

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