ABSTRACT
This book presents a political-economy argument for ‘bringing the state back in’ (as Theda Skocpol once put it). According to the dominant scholarly narrative, after the Second World War, Europe witnessed a settlement between capital and labour that propelled thirty years of ‘miraculous’ egalitarian economic growth. Yet a closer look at the founding of Germany’s Federal Republic and France’s Fifth Republic – which are rarely studied side by side – reveals that state-engineered policy and institutional reforms reframed social preferences away from zero-sum distributional battles and towards productivist modernisation. To explain how autonomous, plural state actors reshaped social groups’ expectations, this book will reclaim key conceptual tools: social learning; the construction of legitimacy; and ideational leadership. Deploying these concepts helps provide an understanding of the riddle of European postwar renaissance that is more satisfying than earlier materialist approaches. Further, focusing on social learning, legitimacy, and ideas (rather than material interests) allows the argument that the main problem facing European countries after the war was less the need to socially contain than it was the need to accommodate economic growth to democratic systems. That accommodation relied on expert governance, which cannot be avoided in order to attain equalitarian prosperity.
