The Keynesian unblocking

In light of Victoria Chick’s work on Keynes and economic methodology, in this chapter I explore why there was a Keynesian revolution at all. The reason I give is that existing political solutions to unemployment were blocked. Keynes offered an unblocking intellectual alternative in which both capitalists and workers would gain. I argue that The General Theory can be read on at least two levels: one responding to the institutional facts of the time, the second a more general rebuttal of the neoclassical road to full employment. Though the first reading has been more popular – the orthodox economics profession has always preferred Keynesian policy to Keynesian theory – Victoria Chick’s work and our experience of the Great Recession require us to build a better macroeconomics based on the second.