This chapter covers: the return to unrestrained laissez faire in the 1920s; realization by some economists of some failures in the functioning of free markets; the discovery of monopolistic competition and of potential shortcoming in aggregate demand; Keynes proposes countercyclical fiscal policy to support demand; conservative resistance to changes and views that governmental intervention would inevitably corrupt the role and the efficiency of free markets; fear of contamination from the “Russian communist revolution”; race riots in the United States, fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany; the impact of the Great Depression on employment and production; growing doubts about free market policies; realization that market operators might not always be constrained by competition but might create cartels and engage in other abuses; Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and his influence; increasingly, many begin to see in a new light a potential role of the government; should the government correct only presumed allocation problems, or also problems in the distribution of income?; the policies of the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s, and the Beverage proposed reforms in the United Kingdom in 1942; making income distribution less unequal became more acceptable; taxes became more progressive; and conservative opposition continued.

Populism is unlikely to be effective where the masses are already incorporated into well-established programmatic parties. However, this chapter shows that deep socioeconomic crises can disrupt those political linkages, providing an opening for populism. The sudden rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in the early 1930s provides the main narrative for this chapter. Long frustrated in both his armed and electoral attempts to gain power, the fallout of the Great Depression in 1929 and Germany’s own banking crisis of 1931 shocked many Germans, especially on the right, out of their existing political affiliations. Hitler, the master demagogue, was ready to take advantage through a sophisticated propaganda machine. In most other cases across interwar Europe, the populist strategy was ineffective. Less severe crises left most the populace embedded in their existing ties to bureaucratic and patronage-based parties.