ABSTRACT
When it came to the question of economic reconstruction after the end of the Second World War, the developed capitalist industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America were overwhelmingly influenced by the traumatic experience of the 1930s’ depression. The two phenomena from these earlier times that appeared particularly threatening were mass unemployment and the restriction and departmentalization of international trade through a network of protectionist and currency controls. The question of how a new world economic order might prevent a return to these conditions was therefore already at the centre of public interest and official thinking in the democratic countries, above all Britain and the United States, long before the end of the Second World War. Sir William Beveridge’s book Full Employment in a Free Society, published in Britain in 1944, found more of an echo in public opinion than almost any economics book that preceded it. Writers of the time, such as Clarence Streit and others, who emphasized not only the political but also the economic significance of the fact that we all have to learn to live in one crowded world, also found a similar interest.
