This chapter examines different styles and contents of attempts to revise the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. It contrasts the devastating critique of the Economic Consequences, with specific proposals with which Keynes was involved that began in November 1919 with meetings in Amsterdam hosted by the Dutch banker Gerard Vissering, and involving a wide range of international bankers, including some influential Americans. The Amsterdam meeting suggested a plan for leveraging private U.S. finance for the sustainable reconstruction of Europe that anticipated some aspects of the 1924 Dawes Plan. Keynes found his role in the Amsterdam plan undermined by the notoriety of the Economic Consequences and the disapprobrium it attracted. How could he hope to persuade the U.S. government after the attack on Woodrow Wilson mounted in the Economic Consequences? There is a sharp contrast – even contradiction – between the Cambridge world of sharp analysis and polemic and the Amsterdam approach, where market-oriented people tried to devise a solution using financial products/financial engineering. And each of these approaches was also quite different from the diplomatic logic that had produced the Versailles Treaty.

This chapter asks how a new generation of central banks in the interwar period changed their function, away from state financing and financial stability provision, and toward stabilizing prices and avoiding fiscal and financial dominance. The new concept of a central bank as an institutional constraint, imposed from the outside, and movement from a “can do” to a “can’t do” institution, ultimately ended in failure. It made for bad policy and poor outcomes, specifically contributing failure to stem contagion in the 1931 financial crisis. After 1945 a new reinvention of central banking involved the elaboration of a social consensus that bought back ele-ments of the “can do” environment.

This chapter examines the origins of European Monetary Union in a debate that started in the 1960s about the dangers posed by German current account surpluses. Solving the question of the German current account in the European setting at first appeared to require some sophisticated and ingenious political mechanism that would force French politicians to pursue more austerity than they would have liked, and Germans less price orthodoxy than they thought they needed. A political mechanism, however, requires continual negotiation and public deliberation, which would have been painful given the policy preferences in the two countries (and in those countries that lined up with either of the Big Two). The increased attraction of monetary union was that it required no such drawn-out political process. The operation of an entirely automatic device would constrain political debate, initiative, and policy choice. But this process raised two questions that were not adequately solved in the sober and meticulous arguments for monetary union, and the monetary union was thus left incomplete. The first concerned the fiscal discipline needed for currency union; the second and even more serious related to the need for a central bank to exercise general financial sector supervision and regulation.

The diverse essays in this volume reflect Jonathan Steinberg's methodological pluralism and insatiable curiosity for historical questions which cross disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Animating students, colleagues, friends and wider audiences with his enthusiasm for ‘thinking about the past’ was his vocation, one that he pursued with unmatched enthusiasm. Through this collection, we hope to convey something of the intellectual range, analytical purchase and moral purpose of his historical writing and teaching.

One feature of Jonathan's inspiring and charismatic lectures was his unique ability to combine an analysis – always fresh, never pre-cooked – of big historical structures and trends with an acute awareness of the importance of individual personalities. His interest in structural analysis is reflected in all of his written work, in Yesterday's Deterrent and in Why Switzerland? and, probably most strikingly and rigorously, in the comparison of German and Italian wartime mentalities in All or Nothing. The culmination of his deep probing into the human psyche that occurred in all of the undergraduate and general lectures came late in his career in powerful form in the masterful biography, Bismarck. What made that book so insightful was the fresh portrait he painted of how the monarch, King and later Kaiser Wilhelm, was a substitute father to the German politician and how the political relationship which moulded the constitution of Imperial Germany was the outcome of the family dynamics in the upbringing of future ‘Iron Chancellor’ – the distant father and the emotional mother. In developing this analysis, Jonathan went far beyond other biographers, even beyond Otto Pflanze, who spent his life writing and then rewriting his Bismarck biography after taking a turn from diplomatic history to psychoanalysis.

There are other features that deserve emphasis. There was a concern for structure, but also an awareness of the importance of chance. Jonathan was also amusing about this, and looked for illustrations in his own biography: he liked to tell the wonderful story of how he became interested in Germany, as if it were not obvious that the son of a famous rabbi should be interested in the cultural and political origins of the greatest crime of the twentieth century. After he trained as a medical orderly to deal with shell shock, or post-traumatic distress, his personnel file apparently had slid behind a radiator so that he was not sent to Korea.

Jonathan Steinberg was a brilliantly inspirational guide to European history when I was a student in the mid-1970s. He brought two aspects that no other European historian (at least in Cambridge) at the time had: first, the conviction that there were important lessons that could be derived from the past; and second, that understanding the past was a complex task that required a deep exercise of the imagination and an artistic quality in simplifying it. There were then two adages that cropped up time and time again in his lectures: the German impressionist Max Liebermann's dictum ‘Skizzen heisst weglassen’ (‘to sketch is to omit’) – that was basically meant positively – and was an agreeable contrast to the work of most of the British historians at the time who were settling down to study what looked like smaller and smaller problems (local or county rather than regional studies of the history of early modern England). And secondly, he cited ‘his old Harvard philosophy tutor’ (we never found out the name): ‘It ain't no honest poker game, but it's sure the best we got in town.’ In addition, Jonathan always emphasized the importance of individual personalities and their psychologies, even or especially in dealing with a structural or geopolitical challenge.

From the 1960s, we could all feel that we lived in the shadow of the arms race between the superpowers. Jonathan's first book, Yesterday's Deterrent, explicitly conjured up the nuclear race in its title and delivered a grim message: the idea of building up big battleship fleets had completely failed to provide balance or to make the world safer. Instead, the search for security and a deterrent had launched the tragedy of the First World War. Thus, the pre-1914 naval race was really the best poker game in town, not only for interpreting the deep fears of the present but also for suggesting solutions that might lead to an escape from the security dilemma (arms control, détente, etc.). There was obviously much that was left to be filled in by later work such as Volker Berghahn's magisterial Tirpitz–Plan, but Jonathan's powerful sketch was the beginning of a historiographical edifice.

Today, the end of the Cold War means an altered geostrategic reality. But the 1914 parallel is still being made, and just as then, some may feel that the poker game is not honest.