Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Standing the Test of Time: Maynard Keynesas's Economic Consequences of the Peace, a Century On
- Part I The Consequences in their Time
- 1 Reparations, Orthodoxy and Fascism
- 2 What Literary Criticism Tells us about Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace
- 3 The Reception and Impact of Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace in Turkey
- 4 The Essays in Persuasion of John Maynard Keynes and their Relevance for the Economic Problems of Today
- Part II The Consequences Today
- Part III Keynes: A Play
- Notes
- Index
1 - Reparations, Orthodoxy and Fascism
from Part I - The Consequences in their Time
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Standing the Test of Time: Maynard Keynesas's Economic Consequences of the Peace, a Century On
- Part I The Consequences in their Time
- 1 Reparations, Orthodoxy and Fascism
- 2 What Literary Criticism Tells us about Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace
- 3 The Reception and Impact of Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace in Turkey
- 4 The Essays in Persuasion of John Maynard Keynes and their Relevance for the Economic Problems of Today
- Part II The Consequences Today
- Part III Keynes: A Play
- Notes
- Index
Summary
For although it is scientifically true that the situation thus delineated was created by a complex of events of which reparations and war debts have been only one, the common man cannot be expected to see it this way.
J. M. Keynes, 16 January 1932Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to contest the conventional wisdom that reparations were responsible for the rise of Hitler. As with the subject of this symposium, this wisdom is owed in part to Keynes's writings, or rather to a very literal interpretation of Economic Consequences of the Peace. Instead I argue that the economic chaos and severe social hardship of Germany through the 1920s and at the start of the 1930s were primarily the result of a hardline imposition of orthodox monetary and fiscal policies.
At face value reparations were severely punitive, but in terms of actual economic impact, cash payments were of far less importance than usually imagined. They were instead important politically, first as a means to the imposition of the orthodox policies, and, subsequently, as a device for right wing, nationalist forces.
The assessment is underpinned by a broader view of global and national economic policy that follows G. L. J. Tily's Keynes Betrayed (2007), in particular drawing a sharp distinction between liberal financial arrangements under private authority and managed systems under public authority.
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- Information
- Keynes's Economic Consequences of the PeaceA Reappraisal, pp. 7 - 34Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014