The early debates over the role of government in economic life, at least during the era of industrialization, took the form of a contest between laissez-faire and thoroughgoing socialism. In Western Europe and North America, however, the movement away from individualism followed a much less radical course, which John Maynard Keynes was one of the first to define. His famous lectures in the mid-1920s on The End of Laissez-Faire carried the following passage:

Keynes, as we can now see, was among the first writers to form a definite vision of the kind of system under which we have come to live during the last half century, the system we now call the Mixed Economy or Welfare Capitalism or the Middle Way.