These two measures were soon seen as the archetypal "Keynesian" tools3 for getting full employment and accepted as essential for economic management by both Conservative and social democratic politicians in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Keynes had, as we saw in the last chapter, expressed more radical notions at points, notably the contention that the very process of expanding capital investment led to a decline in the return on it-"the marginal efficiency of capital" .4 He had even gone so far as to urge the gradual "euthanasia" of the "rentier" who lives off dividends5 and to argue that "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment". 6 But Keynes himself shied away from these more radical insights-"in practice he was very cautious indeed" ,7 writes his ultra-moderate biographer Robert Skidelsky, and the version of Keynesianism8 that hegemonised mainstream economics for the 30 years after the Second World War purged Keynes's theory of its radical elements. For this reason, the radical Keynesian Joan Robinson denounced it as "bastard Keynesianism" .9
Mainstream economics believed in those years that it had the capacity to enable governments to do away with the crises that had plagued capitalism since the early 19th century. The capitalist system could now, the orthodoxy preached, deliver endless prosperity, rising living standards and a decline in the level of class struggle-providing governments accepted its diktats and avoided the "mistakes" of 1929-32.
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Capitalism in the 20th Century