professor Gordon Fletcher it rapidly conquered professional opinion. For biographer Lord Skidelsky, the General Theory triggered a massive reaction immediately after its release, with extensive reviews in journals and popular newspapers all around the world. While many academics were critical, even the harshest critics recognised there was a case to be answered. As with other theoretical revolutions, the young were most receptive with some older economists never fully accepting Keynes's work, but by 1939 Keynes's view had broadly gained ascendancy both in Great Britain and the US. According to Murray Rothbard, an Austrian School economist strongly opposed to Keynes: Rothbard goes on to describe that by the end of the 1930s every single one of Friedrich Hayek's followers at the LSE was convinced by Keynes's ideas – all economists who had previously opposed Keynes's advocacy of state intervention in the economy. Despite Keynes's early success, the revolutionary effect on theoretical economics was soon diminished. From the late 1930s, a process began to reconcile the General Theory with the classical ways of viewing the economy – developments which included Neo-Keynesian and later New Keynesian economics. An alternative take was advocated at the dawning of the revolution by Dennis Robertson, who Fletcher has described as the most intellectually formidable of Keynes's contemporary critics. This view held that the great excitement triggered by the General Theory was unjustified – that genuinely new ideas presented were overstated and not supported by evidence, while the verifiable ideas were merely well-established principles dressed up in new ways. According to Hyman Minsky, this position eventually became dominant in mainstream academia, though it is by no means unchallenged. Origins Lord Skidelsky has written that Keynes's motivation for the revolution arose from the failure of the British economy to recover from its post World War I recession in the manner predicted by classical economics – throughout the 1920s British unemployment remained at historically high levels not previously seen since a brief period in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Skidelsky notes a December 1922 lecture to the British Institute of Bankers where Keynes noted that wages no longer fell with prices in the classical fashion, due in part to the power of unions and wage "stickiness". Keynes recommended government intervention as the cure for unemployment in this circumstance, a position he never deviated from though he was to refine his thinking on what sort of intervention would work best.