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I agree with Greg that the war years were vital to the acceptance of  
the Keynesian framework, but I would like to suggest a further  
rather mundane reason, at least as far as the UK is concerned.   
 
At the start of the war Keynes argued that it would be necessary to  
hold down private demand to accommodate war spending without  
excessive inflation. This was generally accepted as common  
sense, even by those who rejected Keynesian economics in a  
wider sense. But that implied that a main function of government  
policy was to manage aggregate demand, and they set about doing  
it (or trying to do it). At the end of the war it was still necessary to  
suppress pent-up demand to free resources for rebuilding exports,  
reconstruction, etc. There was no clear-cut end to the  
reconstruction period, so the British economy emerged into  
peacetime with a government machine which saw the management  
of aggregate demand as a meaningful thing to do and as one of its  
main responsibilities. Policy debates were carried out in those  
terms, economists were employed to advise on it, etc. The  
practical, if not the intellectual, case was won for a generation.   
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
 
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