Stabilization Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States: Corporatism, Democracy, and Economic Planning, 1945-1980
Historians of ideas have long considered the mixed economies established after World War II to be characterized by a form of “commercial Keynesianism” in which the shape of growth was left to the “indirect” controls of government budgets and credit policy. In this history, the political conflict bet...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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eScholarship, University of California
2021
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| Online Access: | https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4184v0c8 https://escholarship.org/content/qt4184v0c8/qt4184v0c8.pdf |
| Summary: | Historians of ideas have long considered the mixed economies established after World War II to be characterized by a form of “commercial Keynesianism” in which the shape of growth was left to the “indirect” controls of government budgets and credit policy. In this history, the political conflict between organized workers and business cartels that defined the North-Atlantic world during the period between the world wars is said to have given way to the consensual management of national economies characterized by a “postcapitalist” debates over social, racial, and gender inclusion. Considerable scholarship argues that the politics of the era that followed World War II were conditional on the rapid economic growth of postwar reconstruction and expanding world trade. The collapse of North Atlantic growth rates after 1973 thus explains the fate of post-World War II social, political, and economic history, as demands for inclusion in a political economy in which employment and incomes rose more slowly than before became increasingly difficult for institutions to mediate.But what explains the collapse of North Atlantic growth during the 1970s? There are two dominate explanations: the expansion of national budgets to accommodate the social-democratic responsibilities of postwar welfare states and the overcapacity of industrial manufacturing. Neither explanation acknowledges the national experiments in income planning that emerged within the OECD nations during the early 1960s, when the difficulties of maintaining full employment in a world of liberal trade and capital movements first appeared. In the US, such income planning represents a continuity with the interwar struggle over the “problem of monopoly” and “structural reform” that characterized the New Deal. Rather than departing from these efforts at “direct” controls over centers of accumulation and employment, the guiding concepts of the US political-economy after World War II accelerated their orbit around a set of ideas about the role of the state in guiding and ... |
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