ABSTRACT
What came to be known as the “new economics” of the post-Second World War era and the interventionist fiscal and monetary policies pursued by the American government after 1945 did not simply arrive in the published text of Keynes’s General Theory, and nor did they emerge de novo from college and university seminar rooms, faculty offices, and typewriters. They came with military mobilization and war in particular, with power and global authority in general. This “new economics” could not, in fact, subsist without national power. On the one side, American hegemony in the American century was crucially linked with the expansion of the scope and size of government activity, and with a significant commitment by the government to wielding the means (diplomatic, political, military and economic) of that power. It was, as well, dependent upon an apparent political consensus tied to a constellation of social and cultural forces that made anti-communism, global intervention and militarization policies appeal across dimensions of class, ethnicity and gender. For all these reasons, a politicaleconomic approach to the history of economic thought, especially in its American contexts, offers a great deal of enlightenment for our understanding of the emergence of the neoclassical “consensus” in our field.
