tradition

Old Keynesian

The post-war neoclassical synthesis of Keynes's General Theory — IS-LM, the Phillips Curve as a stable policy menu, demand-management as a routine tool of macroeconomic stabilisation.

Stub entry.

Old Keynesianism is the school of the post-war “neoclassical synthesis” — Hicks’s IS-LM, Samuelson’s textbook, the Phillips Curve as the empirical scaffolding for fiscal and monetary fine-tuning. Dominant in graduate teaching and policy advice from the late 1940s through the 1960s; its reputation broke against the stagflation of the 1970s, on which Monetarist and New Classical accounts proved more predictive.

Last updated 2026-04-29