Although those who practiced Keynesian economics did not defend it in precisely these terms, the new political economy displayed two features of the liberalism that defines the procedural republic. First, it offered policymakers and elected officials a way to “bracket,” or set aside, controversial conceptions of the good life, and so promised a consensus that programs for structural reform could not offer. Second, by abandoning the ambition of inculcating certain habits and dispositions, it denied government a stake in the moral character of its citizens and affirmed the notion of persons as
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