How Was the Keynesian Revolution Accomplished? How Was this Mare's Nest of Discredited Mercantilist Fallacies Put Over?

How was the Keynesian Revolution accomplished? How was this mare's nest of discredited Mercantilist fallacies put over? In the first place, by intellectual intimidation. The old fallacies were dressed up by Keynes in such a wilderness of unclear writing and pretentious jargon, in such a bewildering morass of strange concepts, that the Keynesian disciples claimed to be the only ones able to understand the Master. And they trumpeted Youth on their side. The older economists were cowed by newer lights who arrogantly proclaimed that no one over thirty-five was competent to understand the New Economics. Paul A. Samuelson has written of his joy at being under thirty-five when this New Revelation was announced to the world. And as their Master they had an eminent, aristocratic Englishman, witty, charming, and thoroughly irresponsible.

In their conquest, the Keynesians were aided by two other factors. For one thing, the world, inclined ever more toward statism, was looking for an economic theory which would at last make government spending and inflation respectable, while making private thrift and laissez-faire capitalism anathema in their ancient home--among economists. Second, the "neoclassical" economic theory taught at Cambridge (Keynes's home) and also in America, did have important gaps: in failing to integrate monetary theory and general economics, in lacking an adequate theory of the business cycle. For these reasons, the conquest was absurdly easy.

--Murray N. Rothbard, foreword to The Failure of the "New Economics": An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, by Henry Hazlitt (1959; repr., Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), xiv-xv.