Consensus, Dissensus and Economic Ideas: The Rise and Fall of Keynesianism During the Economic Crisis

As the introduction to this special issue argues, the relationship between power and ideas is at the heart of debates over international financial orders, and the cycle of stability of change that we have seen over the last hundred years. Hall [1989] documents how Keynesian ideas were widely (if not universally) accepted across advanced industrialized democracies in the wake of World War II. Ruggie [1982] famously argued that closely related ideas were crucial to the ‘embedded liberalism’ that ordered the international political economy until the 1980s. Both claim that the international regime was underpinned by a rough consensus over economic ideas among advanced industrialized economies. Blyth [2002] and others have documented how this consensus in turn gave way to a new neo-liberal consensus,