In the early twentieth century, changes in production targeted low-income family consumption with labour-saving domestic appliances and factory-produced clothing and shoes. Employment of maids declined. Women’s factory work increased. After the Great War, governments and housing producer groups tamed male-worker unrest with low-interest housing loans. Working-class families left shoddy inner-city tenement abodes for bright, practical homes in Midwest suburbs. White mothers returned to household production. Non-English-speaking families migrated into rural areas. Consequently, family economists like Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt, Margaret Reid, and others studied how to improve the consumption activities of low-income and farming families, a problem that intensified during the Great Depression. Methods included studies of family expenditure, calculations of the value of household production for family income, and the development of consumer price indices. Their pragmatism produced policies to secure adequate family budgets and consumer-friendly markets. However, they accepted gendered divisions of household–market labour, distancing themselves from the feminist organisations that had supported women through war with cooperative domestic labour. Differences in living standards between urban and rural families, and between white and non-white families, were mostly viewed as outcomes of family preference, and not as injustices. Methodologies did not reach the family consumption of Dustbowl evacuees.

What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

The chapter argues that Germany’s major corporate leaders largely agreed between 1918 and 1932 on a self-serving analysis of Germany’s economic problems and an unpopular approach to dealing with them (the Consensus) but splintered and dithered in identifying an appropriate political vehicle for these views (the Dissensus). As a result, they neither defended the Republic nor brought Hitler to power.

The evolution of banking regulation and banking crises are highly intertwined. The post–World War Two period was marked the globalisation of banking and increased banking instability. This initiated a trend towards harmonised frameworks for banking regulation, leading to a common framework for measuring capital adequacy in 1988 (Basel I). The path towards the Basel framework in 1988 was very different in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. When statutory capital requirements were introduced in Switzerland in 1935, most banks were indifferent. This indifference changed towards the end of the 1950s, when capital regulation became a bottleneck for growth. The United Kingdom lacked the experience of a solvency crisis during the 1930s, resulting in capital in banking becoming an almost irrelevant topic. It took until the secondary banking crisis in 1973/4 for banks’ regulation to be reconsidered. The United States did experience a deep banking crisis in the 1930s but introduced statutory capital requirements only in the 1980s, following increased domestic banking instability and the threat of potentially high losses from the Latin American debt crisis.

This chapter analyzes why the SPD failed to stop the collapse of the Weimar Republic and whether it could have averted this outcome, discusses the lessons that German Social Democrats drew from this failure, and assesses to what extent the history of Weimar democracy and its collapse is relevant for analyzing the threat or reality of democratic breakdown in the contemporary world. The SPD leadership decided not to initiate any direct protest action to oppose the Nazi takeover. The chapter argues that any such action, if it had been undertaken, would very likely have been crushed and proven ineffective. There is no imminent threat of democratic breakdown in contemporary Germany or Western Europe. However, the Nazi takeover was the culmination of a process of executive aggrandizement that characterizes many contemporary cases of democratic decline and breakdown. Champions of democracy must combat this process from the outset – before it is too late.

The Great Depression introduced doubts in the minds of many about the virtue of a free market economy. The absence of safety nets, at a time when unemployment had reached 25–30 percent, created major difficulties. The need for redistribution and stabilization was felt by many. The changes in the structure of the economies had facilitated tax collection. The new environment led to welfare states with high and growing progressive taxes, high levels of social spending and growing power by labor unions. For a while harmony between the roles of government and state seemed to grow. Then difficulties would begin to appear and to grow over time and this would set the stage for a counterrevolution in later years. Slow growth and growing inflation starting in the late 1960s and continuing in the 1970s would increase the reaction to the welfare policies and to the great power that labor unions had acquired. There would be increasing calls for a return to a growing role by the free market.

In Chapter 4, I address humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes. The narrowing of political economy by nineteenth-century classical economists was challenged on two fronts. Some economists fought to maintain a broad social and moral perspective, but some economists turned the narrowing theory of classical economists into a stinging rebuke of capitalism itself. I begin by discussing the rising influence of humanism in the twentieth century. Next, I discuss the Hungarian-Austrian political economist Karl Polanyi and his critique of capitalism based on humanism. Although he was initially attracted to Marx’s moral critique, Polanyi eventually rejected Marxism on similar grounds as Tawney. In his search for a moral foundation for capitalism, Polanyi rediscovered the moral theory behind Adam Smith’s writings. I then discuss the British political economist John Maynard Keynes. Similar to Polanyi, Keynes rejected the narrow utilitarianism of both Marx and the classical economists in forming his moral foundation for capitalism based on responsibility and duty. This sets up a discussion of humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism based on Polanyi’s and Keynes’s seminal works.

This introductory chapter deals with the positioning of post-war Western Europe in the ‘Atlantic Century’. During this period of emerging American leadership in international affairs—starting roughly around the time of the American intervention in the First World War—the United States not only gradually accepted the leadership of the free world, it also offered Western Europe protection under the umbrella of an ‘Atlantic Community’. These transatlantic realities offered material and moral comfort, which were indispensable for the reconstruction and resurrection of Europe. Moreover, this new community offered a world of rational policies and democratic politics that was immediately familiar to Europeans. These shared mores fortified the two most resilient beacons of freedom: capitalism and democracy. As such, this transatlantic community transcended national borders while at the same time respecting the concept of the nation-state as the basic model for a new world of cooperation aimed at peace, stability, and prosperity for all. This community of ‘liberal’ states and societies was perceived from the outset as ‘the progeny of Western Christendom’.

After the heavy saturation of blues performing in the 1920s and the application of various elements– rhythm, syncopation, call and response, lyrics, and so on– to avant-garde literature, Black and white, of the time, the country descended into a prolonged Depression in the 1930s. Blues recording ground nearly to a halt for several years, though conditions that fed into the blues were in ample supply. The music was changing with the amalgamation of swing band elements and boogie-woogie with the rural blues, producing a jumping hybrid that used blues structures and lyrics with a big-band lilt. The move to the Left, especially in the artistic community, found literary blues having a decidedly Leftist feel in writers such as Langston Hughes, holding over from the twenties and Frank Marshall Davis emerging in the thirties. There were still the musical artists from various genres, including classical, who made use of the blues, and movies, for example, reflected the music as well. It was a new kind of hot music– and thus, hot music literature– that was in the offing.

This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

This chapter is an overview of central banking developments between 1919 and 1939, highlighting the establishment and operation of 28 new central banks, most in what are now called emerging markets and developing countries. Inspired by expert advice and underpinned by foreign lending, the new banks were designed to function independently from political interference, and to defend the gold standard as part an international, rules-based network of cooperating institutions. The Great Depression revealed the flaws in this setup. As capital flows dried up and international cooperation faltered, the gold standard disintegrated, and central banks were unable to head off macroeconomic and financial collapse. Designed to fight inflation, they were ill-prepared to address financial fragility. In the wake of their failure, a two-pronged reaction set in. Central bank autonomy was curtailed, while monetary policy was subordinated to new policy objectives, including the support of import substitution in Latin America and central planning in Eastern Europe. At the same time, central banks’ powers expanded, as they were transformed into agents of state-led development policy. Thus, the new central banks of the 1920s and 1930s were integrally involved not just in post-First World War reconstruction and the Great Depression, but also in the key economic developments of the mid-20th century.

Established at the behest of the League of Nations to help the country secure an new international loan, the Bank of Greece was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and hostility from its very foundation. The onset of the Great Depression tested its commitment to defending the exchange rate against domestic pressure to reflate the economy. Its policy response has been criticized as being ineffectual and even detrimental: the bank is said to have been unduly orthodox and restrictive, not only during but also after the country’s eventual exit from the gold exchange standard. This chapter combines qualitative and quantitative sources to revisit the Bank of Greece’s decisions during the Great Depression. It argues that monetary policy was neither as ineffective nor as restrictive as its critics suggest, thanks to a continued trickle of foreign lending but also to the Bank’s own decision to sterilize foreign exchange outflows. It reappraises Greece’s attempt to maintain the gold standard after sterling’s devaluation, a decision routinely denounced as a policy mistake. Finally, it challenges the notion that Greece constitutes an exception to the rule that countries that shed their ‘golden fetters’ faster recovered earlier.

This chapter analyses macroeconomic policy, with a focus on monetary policy, relating it to the performance of the economy in Turkey in the Great Depression. The Depression was transmitted to Turkey primarily through a sharp decline in agricultural commodity prices. In response, the government adopted strongly protectionist measures starting in 1929 and pursued import-substituting industrialization. In contrast, Turkey’s macroeconomic policy was cautious. Fiscal policy adhered to the principle of balanced budgets. The policies of the new central bank, established in 1930, were similarly restrained: as a result, the monetary base increased very little before 1938. While this restraint resulted in some appreciation of the currency, Turkey’s economy did better than most others around the Eastern Mediterranean. The chapter argues this performance was primarily due to strong protectionism, which paid benefits in the short run, and recovery in the agricultural sector.

To date, research on Latin American central banks in the interwar years has focused on their loss of autonomy due to the slump and subsequent implementation of innovative, countercyclical monetary policies. These policies, although fostering economic recovery, led to higher rates of inflation and exchange-rate volatility. The chapter shows that these policies resulted from more than loss of autonomy and subordination of central banks to governments. In fact, the need for countercyclical monetary policies had been foreseen by foreign advisors to newly established central bank before and during the crisis, but Latin American central bankers had been reluctant to implement them for fear of damaging the credibility of the gold-standard regime. This finally changed with the collapse of the gold exchange standard. In the 1930s, central banks had become effective actors, channeling credit to the real economy and supporting the emergence of state institutions that would promote the development of local industry.

The grand hoteliers of Berlin, who were also German financial, industrial, and commercial elites, cast their lot with Hitler in 1932. Several factors played into the decision, but the most important was an unshakable pessimism, born of the chaos of 1918–23, especially the hyperinflation of 1923, that never quite dispelled in the years of relative prosperity of 1924–28. After 1929, during the Great Depression, this pessimism hardened into fatalism: that is, certainty that business would fail under present conditions. Under the influence of a contagious fatalism endemic to their milieu by 1932, the Kaiserhof’s owners, in particular, would not have seen or understood the ramifications of their decision to let Hitler use the hotel as his headquarters. On the one hand, the decision at least kept open the possibility of a different future under the next regime. And on the other hand, the alternative, ejecting Hitler, might trigger immediate and violent retaliation by the Brownshirts. In the end, however, these same hoteliers, because they were Jewish, found themselves running for their lives as some of the earliest victims of the Nazi persecution.