ABSTRACT
Juxtaposing references to Suez, Royal Dutch, and Rothschild, and description of the purest of noble French lineage, Proust revealed the contradictions at the very heart of European capitalism. Capitalism, judged cause and solution of all social and political ills, presented as the grand antithesis to Marxism, socialism, Communism, and fundamentalism, has been demolished, left for dead and resuscitated nearly every 20 years from 1905 to 2008. The omnipotent British Empire refused to admit that despite winning World War I, it had lost its undisputed economic hegemony. Suddenly rivaled and surpassed in industrial output and monetary influence by a victorious hyper-exuberant American market economy, Britain depended on Montagu Norman, the eccentric and obsessive governor of the Bank of England, who, in 1925, persuaded Churchill to revert to the Gold Standard until 1931.
