ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation asks why a century of international peace gave way to violent conflict and the erosion of the global economic system after World War I. It finds its answer in the failures of the liberal understanding of the political-economic order that had emerged and taken root during what he called the Hundred Years’ Peace. Hyman Minsky’s work revolved around the tendency of the financial system to crisis and the incompatibility of such instability with the economic doctrines of his time. Minsky’s frustrating early engagements with post-World War II US Keynesianism eventually led to the publication of his own reading of Keynes. For Minsky, crisis originates from the survival constraint – the requirement that one must pay one’s debts when they come due. When the defeated European countries stabilized their currencies after World War I, restoring some of the automaticity of the gold standard, they relied on the victorious countries to provide flexibility.
