ABSTRACT
It may be worth, then, investigating the link between such controversies and the effective progress of the discipline. For instance, in his paper on the history of macroeconomics in the twentieth century Olivier Blanchard maintains that it would be inappropriate to regard macroeconomic history ‘as a series of battles, revolutions and counterrevolutions, from the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and 1940s, to the battles between Monetarists and Keynesians of the 1950s and 1960s, to the Rational Expectations revolution of the 1970s, and the battles between New Keynesians and New Classicals of the 1980s’. Such a description appears in fact to be realistic ‘on the surface’, but provides ‘the wrong image’ of a discipline which, squeezed under the pressure of the events, starts again from zero every twenty years, thus failing to achieve a solid and common body of knowledge. On the contrary, according to Blanchard the ‘right image’ should be that ‘of a surprisingly steady accumulation of knowledge’.2
