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Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace is one of the most famous books in the history of economic thought. It is also one of the most polemical. Published as a response to what Keynes saw as the grave errors of the Treaty of Versailles, the book predicted that war reparations and other harsh terms imposed on Germany would lead to its collapse, which in turn would lead to devastating consequences for Europe and the wider world. Predictions that we now know to have been all too accurate. Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years brings together an international team of experts to assess the legacy of Keynes's best-selling work. It compiles a series of wide-ranging chapters, exploring the varied influence of his ideas and policy contributions. Written in an accessible style, it recovers the importance of this history and examines the continued relevance of Keynes's controversial book.
Paul Krugman is one of the most influential commentators in twenty-first-century America. His authority rests on his status as a Nobel prize-winning economist, but his appeal to millions of American readers derives from his ability to narrate the crises of contemporary American liberalism as dramatic history. By his own account Krugman as a young person was fascinated by the idea of a total social science inspired by the science fiction of Isaac Asimov. As he discovered as a College student in the early 1970s that synthesis of historical and social knowledge does not exist. Krugman became an economist out of disappointment with history. That disappointment was both intellectual – history’s failure to provide succinct causal explanations - and political – history’s tendency towards overdetermined fatalism as opposed to pragmatic simplification. It might be said that in his writings as a public intellectual Krugman has been reaching for the overview that eluded him as a young man. Economics, politics and history mingle freely in his work. This, however, has not led to a stable synthesis. As Krugman has become more deeply engaged in politics, it is the framing assumptions of his economics, the neoclassical synthesis forged at MIT after World War II, that have been put in question.
The conflict that ended in 1945 is often described as a 'total war', unprecedented in both scale and character. Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War adopts a transnational approach to offer a comprehensive and global analysis of the war as an economic, social and cultural event. Across twenty-eight chapters and four key parts, the volume addresses complex themes such as the political economy of industrial war, the social practices of war, the moral economy of war and peace and the repercussions of catastrophic destruction. A team of nearly thirty leading historians together show how entire nations mobilized their economies and populations in the face of unimaginable violence, and how they dealt with the subsequent losses that followed. The volume concludes by considering the lasting impact of the conflict and the memory of war across different cultures of commemoration.
The Second World War marks the transition to a new mode of warfare, one in which scientific and technical knowledge transformed the fighting of war. Most historical studies have focused on the outputs of national R&D systems and asked what made them succeed or fail. Instead, this chapter highlights the global character of these developments and their disrespect for the temporal end of the war. It explores national innovation systems as individual experiments within a larger landscape of war-relevant R&D. Second World War research crystallized a societal configuration that had been forming since the second industrial revolution. Knowledge and its bearers were understood as the key agents of change in the new social order. The theorists of knowledge economies were looking at post-1945 America, which meant they were observing that setting where the fullest effects of wartime R&D mobilization carried forward into the post-war order.