Was Keynes a Corporatist?: Keynes’s Radical Views on Industrial Policy and Macro Policy in the 1920s
Keynes's main purpose in writing The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was to issue a dire warning that if the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles were implemented, the world would face the prospect of economic stagnation, financial crisis, social and political unrest, and, in some countries, possible revolution. But he also used the book to express his belief that Europe stood between two epochs of economic history. World War I accelerated the dissolution of the old order to be sure, and the Treaty threatened to make a peaceful and smooth transition to a new socioeconomic regime impossible, but Keynes believed that the old order was destined to crumble anyway. Keynes argued that the conditions that made possible the high growth rate in Europe and North America between 1870 and World War I were inherently transitory. In the second sentence of the book, he states that "very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century" [Keynes 1971a, 2:1]. Toward the book's end, he drew the following conclusion: