ABSTRACT
The critical significance of the methodological issues emerges clearly from even a cursory examination of the political consequences of the general acceptance of bourgeois explanations of the post-war monetary crisis. In the orthodox view this stems directly from the Keynesian interventionism which has disrupted the rationality of the market and thus allowed rigidities and indisciplines to develop which preclude the operation of the automatic mechanisms which would otherwise have maintained both prosperity and equilibrium. Post-war economic development, looked at in relation to the trade cycle theory developed earlier, can be seen as a recovery in the 1940s from depression and war. Looked at in relation to monetary policies, people see a period of close nationalist controls in the 1940s and 1950s giving way to an increasing liberalisation and internationalisation in the 1960s and 1970s. The problems, and their effect on monetary and financial variables, remain entirely unresolved and are likely to initiate a period of prolonged depression.
