The “counterrevolution” in development theory of the 1970s and 1980s was part of a more general neoliberal reaction (in the name of renewed faith in classical and neoclassical economics) that was opposed to Keynesianism, social democracy, state intervention, and structuralism, not to mention radical theories like dependency (see Chapter 5). The story of this counterrevolution has been told by John Toye (1987). For Toye, the counterrevolution in development economics began when University of Chicago economist Harry Johnson (1923–1977) criticized Keynesian economics during the early 1970s. Johnson thought that intellectual movements in economics responded to perceived social needs rather than arising from an autonomous, purely scientific, dynamic. Hence, the secret of Keynesianism’s success was its promise to end mass unemployment rather than its scientific veracity. But for Johnson (1971), the depression of the 1930s had resulted from the coincidence of several different factors rather than being a structural crisis. Thus, Johnson found that Keynes’s conclusion that capitalism tended to systematically produce massive economic problems (stagnation, unemployment, etc.) to be unjustifiably critical of the entire capitalist system. Economic policies founded on Keynesian theory displayed a similar lack of confidence in capitalism. For Johnson, further, development economists had erred in adopting industrialization and national self-sufficiency as the primary policy objectives with economic planning as their instrument. This had led to unproductive industrial investments in developing countries, especially those of postindependence Africa. It had encouraged corruption, favored import substitution (that in turn led to balance of payments problems), and in general made for misguided (state) interventions into economic life in a futile attempt at achieving social justice. The problems of the developing countries, said Johnson, came not from the legacy of colonial history, nor from global inequalities, but instead from misguided Keynesian development policies. Later Johnson extended this critique to the Harrod–Domar model’s “concentration on fixed capital investment as the prime economic mover” (Johnson and Johnson 1978: 232). Johnson thought that Keynesian policy makers’ neglect of the possibilities of technical progress and their mesmerization with problems of disguised underemployment, especially in rural areas, led to development policies that merely transferred productive resources into industrial production with no economic gain. In contrast, the viewpoint of the Chicago school of economics regarding the rural sector, propounded by T. W. Schultz (1964), was that even poor farmers were efficient profit maximizers.