Introduction

The shift from Keynesian to anti-Keynesian economic policies originating in the mid-1970s is one of the clearest manifestations in recent economic, administrative, and political history of a reversal in a particular set of public policies. Why many advanced capitalist democracies in the 1970s and 1980s, including Australia, moved away from the consensus position of the recognition and practice of what had come to be known as Keynesian economics is an under-researched question in political-economic history. Countless references are made to the breakdown of Keynesianism, and in some instances the phenomenon is duly discussed, and even, on occasions, probed. For reasons that will be outlined here, however, the breakdown of something as fundamental as Keynesianism has not been comprehensively explained. The exciting work of Peter Hall, in attempting to explain the rise of Keynesianism, has been an exception to this.1 And recently Christopher Hood has taken up an interest in attempting to build a conceptual model with which to approach something as significant as the shift from Keynesian to anti-Keynesian thought and practice.2 We turn to these and associated works throughout in order to come to terms with the collapse of Keynesianism and full employment in the 1970s.