Barrapunto

El primer partido socialdemócrata fue el SPD alemán, fundado en 1869 y señalado como ejemplo a seguir por los líderes de la Internacional. Le siguieron los partidos socialdemócratas de España (1879), Bélgica (1885), Austria (1889), Hungría (1890), Polonia (1892), Rumania (1893), Bulgaria y Holanda (1894), Argentina (1896), y Rusia (1898). Un desarrollo político muy importante tuvieron los partidos socialdemócratas escandinavos (Dinamarca, 1871; Noruega, 1887; Suecia, 1889). En Inglaterra y algunos otros países los partidos socialistas siguieron una línea más laborista y adoptaron ese nombre.

Keynes was a life-long member of the Liberal party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from as early as 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926 when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economics policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third party status by the Labour party.

Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death he wrote:

He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him.

For his part, Keynes praised Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom, writing to the Austrian economist that, "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it."

In 1926 Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Liberal leader. Since the disastrous election result in 1924 the Liberals were now very much the third party in British politics, but still Lloyd George was able to release money from his fund to finance candidates and ideas for public works to reduce unemployment (as detailed in pamphlets such as the "Yellow Book" and the "Green Book"). Lloyd George was also helped by John Maynard Keynes to write We can Conquer Unemployment [britainforpeace.org], setting out Keynesian economic policies to solve unemployment.