New revisionists and the Keynesian era: an expanding consensus?
are a useful Keynesian standard against which to measure policy and that the dominant discourse in economic theory in Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s was Keynesian. Neither of us doubts that the making of economic policy resulted from a complex interplay of economic, political, and personal factors. We share the conviction that seeking to understand that process by means of explicit tests is fraught with difficulty. Peden has made some criticisms of the methodology of my approach to measuring Keynesian influence on British economic policy, most of which seem eminently sensible. However, his assessment of the practicality and effects of policy still mystifies me. I The making of macroeconomic policy implies decisions made by politicians on the basis of advice from generalist Treasury officials who in turn were and are able to turn to professional economic advisers, whether inside or outside Whitehall. The problem for the substantial literature on Keynesian ideas and macroeconomic policy is to disentangle whether economic advisers within the Keynesian tradition managed to influence the final decision-takers, with the added complication of defining precisely what 'Keynesian' means. These difficulties are controllable in the period from roughly 1920 to 1946 when Keynes was (just about) the only authoritative 'Keynesian' adviser. However, they become exceedingly difficult thereafter with the rapid multiplication of authoritative Keynesian voices and the emergence of peacetime economic problems that Keynes had not confronted. As the existing literature had sometimes been less than explicit (to say the least) on analytical approaches, I proposed a simple test; macroeconomic policy could be termed Keynesian if decisiontakers followed advice from the Keynesian economists in the Economic Section, Whitehall's primary source of internal professional economic advice. Peden lists four main difficulties with this method. The first is under-valuation of politicians and advisers outside the Economic Section. If the role of ministers appears undervalued, that was certainly not the intention. The aim was to present an account of interactions between ministers, generalists, and Whitehall's specialist