Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of boxes
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Europe's laissez-faire system and its impact before World War I
- 2 Decline of laissez-faire and the rise of the regulated market system
- 3 Economic dirigisme in authoritarian–fascist regimes
- 4 The centrally planned economic system
- 5 Mixed economy and welfare state in an integrated post-World War II Western Europe
- 6 Globalization: return to laissez-faire?
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Decline of laissez-faire and the rise of the regulated market system
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of boxes
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Europe's laissez-faire system and its impact before World War I
- 2 Decline of laissez-faire and the rise of the regulated market system
- 3 Economic dirigisme in authoritarian–fascist regimes
- 4 The centrally planned economic system
- 5 Mixed economy and welfare state in an integrated post-World War II Western Europe
- 6 Globalization: return to laissez-faire?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
John Maynard Keynes, in his Sidney Ball Lecture at Oxford University in 1924, challenged the biases in favor of laissez-faire. As in the title of his essay, The End of Laissez-faire, Keynes prophesied a new age. War experiences certainly played an important role in forming his revolutionary views and negating the basic principle of Adam Smith:
War experience in the organization of socialized production, has left some near observers optimistically anxious to repeat it in peace conditions. War socialism unquestionably achieved a production of wealth on a scale far greater than we ever knew in Peace … The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance … For the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the Unemployment of Labour … Yet the cure lies outside the operations of individuals … I believe that the cure for these things is partly to be sought in the deliberate control of the currency and of credit by a central institution … [savings and investments should be regulated] I do not think that these matters should be left entirely to the chances of private judgment and private profits … We do not dance even yet to a new tune. But a change is in the air.
(Keynes, 1927: 5, 35, 39, 47–9, 52–3)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Economic History of Twentieth-Century EuropeEconomic Regimes from Laissez-Faire to Globalization, pp. 42 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006