Keynesian Consensus and Dissensus during the Economic Crisis and after

The fate of Keynesian ideas about stimulus strategy in the recent economic crisis poses a major puzzle for standard accounts of political economy. Keynesian ideas, which had seemed to be discredited, suddenly re-emerged again to create a new temporary consensus, which collapsed into disagreement between pro- and anti-Keynesians very soon after. Standard bargaining accounts of international politics, in which ideational debates are the side effects of power bargaining, fail to explain the timing and sequence of events. So too do standard ideational accounts, whether they focus on epistemic communities, organizational contexts, or the power of ideology. In this paper, we employ a different approach, building on both Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions and Marion Fourcade’s mapping out of the international profession of economics. We argue that economic stimulus during crisis created a ‘hinge’ between academic economists and economic policy makers in Germany and the United States, temporarily bringing two fields of contention into close contact with each other. This allows us to map how change in consensus about demand stimulation occurred; first as a change within the economics profession that shaped the options available to policy makers, and then as a change in the circumstances of policy debate that allowed policy makers to reshape academic argument.