Deflecting the Crisis

This book elucidates the ideological, institutional, and social underpinnings of the US-sponsored Keynesian Consensus (emphasizing the formative period between the New Deal and the Korean War). It explores the relations among three historical processes: the proliferation of Keynesian precepts and initiatives (amidst the renovation of economic science and the institutionalization of national accounting); the accommodation of social movements (amidst the mounting fear of communism); and the solidification of US hegemony. This study contextualizes the US government''s attempt to internationalize the New Deal—initially through the Marshall Plan in Western Europe and Truman''s Point Four Program in the Third World and subsequently through economic, technical, and military assistance to non-communist countries. The essential features of the postwar reconstruction were as follows: the attempt to direct working-class resistance in the West into the construction of welfare states; and the attempt to direct anticolonial, nationalist, and worker resistance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into the construction of developmental states.