Tale of a Death Exaggerated: How Keynesian Policies Survived the 1970s

It has become a commonplace to divide the post-war period into ‘Keynesian’ and ‘post-Keynesian’ eras, usually with the break point in the 1970s. This article challenges that periodisation and the arguments that underpin it. It is argued that Keynesianism did not die in the 1970s, but survived, if somewhat mutated, into the twenty first century. This proposition is then used to challenge exaggerated views about the scale of the crisis of the 1970s.