To understand the crisis we need to get beyond the blame game. For at the root of the crisis was not failures of character or competence, but a failu… - Robert Skidelsky

The question remains: to what extent were the successes and failures of the golden age the result of Keynesian theory, however bastardized? The quick answer is: to a much greater extent in the former than in the latter. Keynesianism provided an analytical framework for organizing policy choices. It also provided ad hoc rationalizations for what governments wanted to do for other reasons. At the rhetorical level, these were important. They created the expectation that full employment would be maintained by policy. This reinforced the favourable background for business investment. To a more limited extent, Keynesian policy as practised in the 1 9 6os brought the golden age into crisis: but there were more profound reasons relating to the drift of social policy (sometimes called the 'revolution in entitlements'), the role of the United States in the world, and the weakness of the Bretton Woods system of international institutions. So the old coach did make a difference.

It was his sense of the precariousness of capitalist civilisation which drew Keynes to monetary policy. Instability in the value of money was undermining the social contract on which capitalism was based.

What started Keynes on the road to the Keynesian Revolution was the incomplete British recovery from the depression of 1920 to 1922.