ABSTRACT
In an important 1983 article, John Ruggie (1983) highlighted the central role of the ideology of “embedded liberalism” in influencing the construction of the global monetary order after the Second World War. Embedded liberals sought to build quite a different kind of global monetary order from the gold standard that “classical liberals” had endorsed. Instead of celebrating the discipline of the gold standard, they sought to strengthen the capacity of national governments to pursue domestically oriented activist monetary policies (although still within the context of a multilateral world economy). National policy autonomy was bolstered through adjustable exchange rates, the provision of balance of payments financing, and the endorsement of capital controls. The international monetary system was now to be more of a “servant” of the domestic Keynesian and welfarist goals that had emerged so prominent across many industrial countries in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s (Helleiner 1993).
