ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how great economic ideas have guided European choices in the years of modern capitalism’s greatest recession. It examines, first, the Great Recession of 2008 and the last obstacle to European unity; second, how the economic trilemma becomes a political trilemma; and third, the crisis of neoliberalism, the pandemic shock and the Recovery Plan. The 2008 crisis, like the previous great crisis of 1929, remains shrouded in a fog of mystery that economic historians are still trying to dispel. To be at least partly understood, the crisis must be contextualised within the economic cycle of the 2000s. The Great Recession reignited the old dispute between Friedrich Hayek and J.M. Keynes. In Europe, sovereignty cannot belong either to the market or to an elite of technocrats lacking the full democratic legitimacy that only comes from popular participation in collective deliberations and from a use of power for the common good of the peoples.
