could not do. For opponents, admitted Keynesian economist Alex
Leijonhufvud, “it was a debacle.”^17 “By 1980,” added Alan Blinder,
“it was hard to find an American academic macroeconomist under
the age of 40 who professed to be a Keynesian.”^18 Politicians on the
right rapidly “latched on to Monetarist ideas as a way of attacking
state expenditure and intervention for stoking inflation.” For them,
explained Michael Bleaney, “monetarism was to become the way to
link popular dissatisfaction about taxation, public generosity and the
suspicion that it was being abused by ‘scroungers’ with the other great
source of anxiety, inflation.”^19
A second line of attack came from the study of individual economic
agents by rational choice and rational expectations scholars. The
rational choice approach, which emerged with the works of scholars
like James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Anthony Downs, and Mancur
Olson, analyzed political and social phenomena through the lenses
of the utilitarian framework of neoclassical economics.^20 Individuals
were portrayed as rational egoists unlikely to cooperate, voters as
rational-ignorant and abstainers justified in not voting, bureaucrats
and politicians as “maximizers” of budgets and votes, and groups and
social movements as seekers of unwarranted privileges and rents. In
this perspective, which updated the old conservative distrust of
democracy and of the state, citizens could not expect much from the
political process or even from cooperative social relations. The best
they could hope for was to have as many social functions fulfilled by
the market as possible, this mechanism being immunized by compe-
tition from power and rent seeking. A complementary explanation
was offered by economists such as Robert Lucas, who studied what
they called “rational expectations.” The idea, here, was to challenge
the Keynesian view of economic agents as acting in conditions of
radical uncertainty, on the basis of “conventions,” “motives,” or even
(^17) Alex Leijonhufvud (1983), quoted in Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg,
The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought, Cambridge University
18 Press, 1995, p. 54.
Alan S. Blinder, “The Fall and Rise of Keynesian Economics,”Economic
19 Record, vol. 64, no. 187, December 1988, 278–94, p. 278.
20 Bleaney,The Rise and Fall of Keynesian Economics, p. 141.
Roger E. Backhouse, “The Rise of Free Market Economics: Economists and the
Role of the State since 1970,” in Steven G. Medema and Peter Boettke (eds.),
The Role of Government in the History of Economic Thought, Durham, Duke
University Press, 2005, p. 359.
142 Left and Right in Global Politics