Think tanks slowly displaced Keynesianism with free-market doctrine in Britain

Evidence

A closely related strand in the new philosophy of the radical Right are the themes of anti-collectivism and anti-statism. “Thatcherism” has given these elements of neoliberal doctrine within conservative “philosophy” an extensive rejuvenation. At the level of theoretical ideologies, anti-statism has been refurbished by the advance of monetarism as the most fashionable economic credo. Keynesianism was the linchpin of the theoretical ideologies of corporatist state intervention throughout the postwar period, assuming almost the status of a sacred orthodoxy or doxa . To have replaced it in some of the most powerful and influential apparatuses of government, in research and the universities, and restored in its place the possessive individualist and free-market nostrums of Hayek and Friedman is, in itself, a remarkable reversal. Ideological transformations, however, do not take place by magic. For years bodies like the Institute for Economic Affairs have been plugging away in the margins of the Conservative Party and the informed public debate on economic policy, refurbishing the gospel of Adam Smith and the free market, undermining the assumptions of neo-Keynesianism, planning and projecting how the “competitive stimulus” could be applied again to one area after another of those sectors which, as they see it, have fallen into the corporatist abyss. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1108

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in economic thought: the IEA’s long-marginal campaign mirrors think-tank influence documented in other works on neoliberal ascendancy (e.g., Mirowski on the Mont Pelerin Society). — connects to: Neoliberal ideas were displaced by Keynesianism only briefly — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 157; Conservatives abandoned austerity as an intellectual argument once Keynesianism triumphed — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 352; Key Austrian works failed commercially while Keynesianism dominated economics — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 384 (+5 more)
• SEED: Article angle: the deliberate, decades-long pipeline of think-tank-to-government idea diffusion as a model for how economic orthodoxy actually changes.