The New Classical All-Out Attack on Keynesian Macroeconomics

Friedman had few qualms about the Marshallian-Keynesian conceptual apparatus. His anti-Keynesian offensive was mainly a matter of policy. This was no longer true for the next wave of attack against Keynesian theory led by Lucas and others, and inaugurat­ing “new classical macroeconomics”.

The transition from Keynesian to new classical macroeconomics deserves to be viewed as a Kuhnian scientific revolution. This expression refers to an episode in the history of a discipline where a period of normal development is disturbed because of the persistence of unsolved puzzles which trigger a drive to change the agenda, the conceptual toolbox and the research methods in radical ways. This is often accompanied by thundering declarations of war (for example, Keynesian theory is “dead”), a confrontation between younger and older generations of researchers, the rise of new stars in the profession, and the eclipse of the previous stars.