Keynesianism
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was a British economist who was closely
involved with practical politics in the 1920s and 1930s, especially with the
Liberal Party and their senior political leaders both at the Versailles Peace
Conference and later during the inter-war slump. In his economic works,
particularly his classicalGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
(1936), he advocated a theory of how governments could control and
manipulate the economy to avoid the worst of slumps and inflationary booms.
This involved the idea of using budget deficits or surpluses to counter cyclical
trends in the economy by pumping money into the economy during a slump,
thus increasing purchasing power and raising demand, or raising taxes during
an inflationary period in order to take excess demand out of the economy.
During the 1930s and 1940s these ideas rather slowly became accepted in
government circles through much of the Western world, eventually forming
the basis of government policy in post-war economic debate. For example,
even the highly conservative US President Richard Nixon announced, in
1972, that he was a Keynesian.
The main features of Keynes’ theory were commitments to full employ-
ment and stable currency, and above all the idea that economic performance
was controllable without recourse to socialist methods ofnationalization
and direct state control of economic decisions. Instead governments could
leave all detailed decisions in the hands of individual firms, and operate
through setting tax levels and interest rates to ‘fine tune’ the overall economy.
Until the late 1970s this was a more or less consensual policy among most
important political parties and the vast majority of professional economists.
Thereafter the ideas came under more and more pressure from ‘right-wing’
alternatives, especially monetarismassociated with American economic
theorists like Milton Friedman of theChicago School, which, by the late
1980s, gained a dominance in Western societies equivalent to Keynesianism’s
earlier sway. There are very few professional economists who would now
identify themselves as Keynesian, and fewer politicians. The extent to which
his doctrines are actually contradicted by the dominant monetarist school is,
however, unclear.
Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was the first overall leader of the Soviet Union
to have risen entirely within the ranks of the organized party apparatus (see
Communist Party of the Soviet Union), being of the generation after the
original leaders who had organized the machinery of the state. Having fought,
Khrushchev