This article uses the case of the economist John Malcolm Blair as a vehicle for examining the durability of the institutional tradition in US economic policy making. Over a multidecade federal government career, Blair played an important role in focusing policy debate on institutionalist concerns like economic structure and corporate power even through the heyday of the Keynesian Revolution. Indeed, Blair stood as representative of an overlooked postwar policy-intellectual current that strove to anchor the study of macroeconomic issues like inflation and unemployment upon solid microfoundations: what I call Institutional Keynesianism. A primary influence behind such policy developments as the Celler-Kefauver Anti-Merger Act of 1950 and the wage–price guideposts implemented by the Kennedy administration, Blair’s work sheds light on the meaningful yet often neglected links between different schools of economic thought and policy domains.
