Vaughan Williams lived through times of rapid social change, unprecedented violence – two world wars – and political determination in the aftermath of those wars to build a better world for their survivors. His hopes for the democratization of ‘high culture’, and especially for wider popular participation in music-making, were shared by other influential figures in Britain’s overlapping cultural and educational establishments, though not by everyone: there was an elite backlash, with ‘standards’ maintenance the declared point of contention. (Simple snobbery probably did have something to do with it.)

This chapter explores Vaughan Williams’s work for the cause of cultural democracy, places it in social and political context, and names his most determined opponents. It focusses particularly on his roles as a member of Britain’s Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, set up soon after the start of the Second World War to help maintain civilian morale, and as a founding member of CEMA’s peacetime successor body the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This chapter examines the newly expanded and transformed theatre ecology enabled by the post-war rise of central government subsidy to the arts. It explores subsidy’s ambitions, achievements, and benefits, but also its turbulence and the ideological risks embedded in its deeply ambivalent objectives to foster elite arts but also democratise the arts. The chapter begins by giving a history of British theatre subsidy and considers its contribution to the development of theatre as one of Britain’s great cultural assets through its visionary promotion of such things as artists’ independence, the expansion of theatre infrastructure, and a conception of theatre as a civic right. The chapter then considers some of the hazards arising from how theatre subsidy has been practised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (and successor organisations), especially its tendency to reinforce elite privileges of metropolitanism, class, and whiteness. The chapter critiques the elitism of British arts subsidy’s legacy and proposes transformation of its practices to become more accountable, more democratic, and more dispersed, helping to make British theatre and culture more diverse and better informed by a greater variety of imaginations.

This chapter examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and to the German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes’s book appeared, Davidson and Cassel strongly endorsed it. Heckscher also agreed with Keynes in a long review entitled “Too Bad to Be True”. Inspired by his Malthusian view, Wicksell found the reparations feasible if only German population growth was arrested. The contacts between the Swedes and Keynes became close after Keynes’s book, in particular between Cassel and Keynes. The exchange of views took a new turn when Bertil Ohlin responded to an article by Keynes in The Economic Journal in 1929 on the transfer problem. The famous Keynes–Ohlin discussion laid the foundation for the analysis of the transfer problem, bringing Ohlin international recognition. We also trace how Davidson, Cassel and Heckscher changed their appreciation of Keynes in the 1930s with the publication of the General Theory while Ohlin viewed the message of Keynes in the 1930s as consistent with the policy views of the Stockholm school of economics.

In Chapter 4, I address humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes. The narrowing of political economy by nineteenth-century classical economists was challenged on two fronts. Some economists fought to maintain a broad social and moral perspective, but some economists turned the narrowing theory of classical economists into a stinging rebuke of capitalism itself. I begin by discussing the rising influence of humanism in the twentieth century. Next, I discuss the Hungarian-Austrian political economist Karl Polanyi and his critique of capitalism based on humanism. Although he was initially attracted to Marx’s moral critique, Polanyi eventually rejected Marxism on similar grounds as Tawney. In his search for a moral foundation for capitalism, Polanyi rediscovered the moral theory behind Adam Smith’s writings. I then discuss the British political economist John Maynard Keynes. Similar to Polanyi, Keynes rejected the narrow utilitarianism of both Marx and the classical economists in forming his moral foundation for capitalism based on responsibility and duty. This sets up a discussion of humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism based on Polanyi’s and Keynes’s seminal works.

The Blanc casinos were marketed through the cultivation of an impression of honesty and mechanical universality. The study of probability, which arose historically in relationship to the calculation of gambling odds, provided a way to measure the honesty of a casino. Probability, as it was expressed in the context of nineteenth-century resort casinos, was the object of renewed interest among professional mathematicians and amateurs seeking to understand the logic of the games they played. There are three avenues through which this amplified interest in probability was expressed in the nineteenth century: the analysis of “runs” (a long sequence of identical results), the systems that gamblers developed for beating the odds, and the casino as an experimental space for mathematicians in the nineteenth century. Together, these developments suggest that the nineteenth-century casino provided a novel opportunity for inquiry into areas such as the nature of time, the limits of causation, and the science of probability.

A photograph from 1941 shows a hall in use as a feeding centre for destitute families. In the background, the Old Vic theatre company sets up for a performance. Part of a Ministry of Information series documenting the Old Vic’s tour of the South Wales coalfields (1941), it serves as a reminder of economic failure in early twentieth-century Britain. The Old Vic, a home for Shakespeare, opera, and ballet since before the start of the First World War, was one of a number of pre-war and wartime organizations bringing art and education to the people. It was their approach to art for all which largely inspired the establishment of the government Committee (later Council) for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the forerunner of the Arts Council. A Ministry of Information film (1942) by Dylan Thomas, Alan Osbiston, and others that documents CEMA’s work shows the arts as an essential and productive part of the war effort, while also making the Keynesian economic case for arts funding. Modest financial support for the arts creates employment (including manual jobs) and life-enhancing consumption (theatre-, gallery-, and concert-going). Since no physical goods are involved, money circulates in the economy without inflation.

The chapter describes the attempt to underwrite peace through trade by creating an International Trade Organization (ITO), creating an international contract for rules-based trade under the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), and creating the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Economic debates at the Paris Peace Conference were dominated by the principal question of who should meet the costs of war and reconstruction. While the need to re-establish a functioning and stable global financial and economic order was recognised, addressing that need was secondary to the more immediate questions of reparations and indemnities; this hierarchy has carried forth into the historiography as well, which, for better or worse, has tended to focus on the post-war reparations burden in an attempt to understand the rise of National Socialism in Germany. However, this emphasis on reparations obscures the very deliberate and determined work undertaken at the conference to restore stability and construct a functioning international financial order, however scarred the system might be by the burdens of inter-allied indebtedness, the effects of wartime destruction, and the exclusion of a considerable portion of the pre-war system by the revolutionary upheaval in Russia, to name just of a few of the challenges faced. This chapter offers a correction in emphasis on the reparations question as just one of an intricate nexus of stratagems proposed and implemented with the goal of engendering financial reconstruction and stability in the post-war period

Row upon row of Victorian terraced houses in areas such as Romsey testify to the huge expansion of Cambridge in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The author shows how the growth of town and University was hastened by the enclosure of the medieval open fields, the arrival of the railway in 1845 and long overdue reforms to the University. The population of the University swelled as it finally opened its doors to scholars of different religions in 1856, and to women in 1869. The author looks at pioneer women at Newnham and Girton, the first Black students, and the first academic wives permitted in Cambridge. The role of University abolitionists and campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano are also explored. When the Duke of Devonshire founded the Cavendish Laboratory, there followed a tremendous period of scientific advance which included the discovery of the electron and neutron and splitting of the atom, led by J. J. Thomson, Rutherford and Chadwick. Significant individuals such as Darwin, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and poet Rupert Brooke are also included, as are the charms of Grantchester Meadows and the Orchard Tea Garden.

This chapter examines the embedded liberal perspective of the Anglo-American thinkers who played a lead role in designing Bretton Woods order, including John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. These thinkers endorsed the broad liberal goals of boosting global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom, but they argued that these goals could only be met with a new kind of institutionalized liberal multilateralism that would make an open world economy compatible with various kinds of active public management of the economy. The roots of embedded liberalism can be found in efforts to reformulate the international side of classical economic liberal thought earlier in the twentieth century, including by thinkers such as Jehangir Coyajee.and John Hobson. The promoters of embedded liberalism at Bretton Woods sought to accommodate not just new ideas of domestic social security and activist macroeconomic management in Western Europe and North America but also the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning and neomercantilist views prominent in many less industrialized regions. At the same time, they made much less effort to engage with the perspectives discussed in the second part of this volume.

Although autarkic thought has not received much attention from IPE scholars, there is a long history of thinkers who prioritized their state’s economic self-sufficiency in order to enhance its autonomy (economic, political, and/or cultural) from foreign influence. This autarkic goal was rejected by classical economic liberals, neomercantilists, and most Marxists, but autarkic perspectives had at least as important a place in political debates as these other better-studied ones in some pre-1945 contexts. Like the other perspectives examined in this book, some strands of autarkic thought also circulated internationally in the pre-1945 era. This chapter identifies influential autarkic ideas developed by a number of thinkers from places as diverse as Britain (John Maynard Keynes, just briefly in 1933), China (Chen Gongbo), Germany (Johann Fichte, Friedrich Zimmermann), Haiti (Edmund Paul), India (Mohandas Gandhi), Japan (Aizawa Seishisai, Shizuki Tadao), Korea (Lee Hang-ro), Paraguay (José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia), Russia (Peter Kropotkin), Turkey (Sevket Süreyya Aydemir), and the west African colony of the Gold Coast (Kobina Sekyi). The chapter also highlights important disagreements amongst these thinkers, ranging from the specific reasons they prioritized autonomy to their views of the relationship between autarky and peace.

Origin stories of the economics discipline give considerable credit not only to philosophy, but also to poetry. And many canonical economists have reputations for polymathy. But interdisciplinary economic inquiry, like that which has become increasingly common since 2008, is often treated as both novel and ill-fated, in part because contemporary orthodox economists lack the commitment to pluralism necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. This chapter looks to a 2020 Climate Fiction (“CliFi”) novel, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, for models of interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, critical theorists, and climate scientists. In particular, Robinson centers an unlikely pair of Utopian thinkers – British economist John Maynard Keynes and American theorist Fredric Jameson – who at crucial junctures in their careers took seriously what is also the project of Robinson’s titular Ministry: treating future generations as a political constituency deserving of political representation in the present.

By November 1932 the United States economy was in a deep depression. The unemployment rate was above 20 per cent, the highest it had ever been, and the production of goods and services had fallen by 28 per cent since its peak in 1929. America needed fresh ideas.

It found them in a new president. During the first hundred days of his presidency Franklin D. Roosevelt, together with a largely Democratic Congress, instituted a broad range of spending and lending programmes and various new regulations that would collectively become known as the New Deal. The range of programmes included things such as state and local public works initiatives, temporary relief for the unemployed and the payment of farm subsidies.

Thomas Roberts Malthus is typically considered a ‘classical’ economist together with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. However, in important respects his view differed fundamentally from theirs, as Keynes emphasised in his biographical essay on Malthus. Most importantly, Malthus vehemently opposed Ricardo’s doctrine that it was impossible for effective aggregate demand to be deficient. Keynes, who also insisted on the possibility of effective demand failures, therefore considered Malthus to have been a precursor of his own view. The chapter discusses the following themes. What was the classical conception of ‘Say’s law’ and what were the reasons why Ricardo endorsed and Malthus rejected it? What were the main lines of reasoning in the ‘general glut’ controversy between Malthus and Ricardo? Was Keynes justified in considering Malthus’s doctrine to foreshadow his own doctrine, and if not, why not? What are the reasons why according to Pasinetti the classical (Ricardo-Sraffa) approach to the theory of relative prices and income distribution is compatible with Keynes’s principle of effective demand?

The aim of this chapter is to look at Pasinetti’s work, as a distinctive member of the Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics, and consider if and how social concerns constitute a pillar of his scientific research. Primary literature is therefore the main source of this chapter. After having traced Pasinetti to Cambridge School, we look at his critique of mainstream economics. We then consider his analysis of the Industrial Revolution's ‘production paradigm’ and the need to move from a pure exchange model to a pure production model. Furthermore, we show how this new paradigm is linked to the analysis of specific, crucial issues: the centrality of labour; the social function of capital; and the role of the institutions. The influence of the Italian tradition of economic thought and of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church is discussed through the lens of the importance Pasinetti attributed to the aims of economic research and the challenges imposed by globalisation.

Chapter 8 analyzes his work for the League of Nations, which resulted in the first macro-econometric model of the US economy. The League’s Economic and Financial Section was a hub of economic expertise in the 1930s. Before Tinbergen arrived, Gottfried Haberler had produced an overview of the business-cycle theories. This chapter argues that the projects of Haberler and Tinbergen are best understood as outcomes of joint work under the supervision of Arthur Loveday and Dennis Robertson, with the help of assistants, coauthors, and expert committees. Although commissioned and published under the names of particular authors and understood as monographs, the studies are attempts to create expert consensus. A detailed study of the Tinbergen report demonstrates at once the various coauthors and internal critics involved and the contested nature of virtually all aspects of the study, as well as the potency of this new teamwork, without which the study would have been impossible. That this report was meant to forge expert consensus means that the critique of John Maynard Keynes of both studies should be understood partly as a challenge to the League of Nations as an institution, and partly to this new type of consensual expert knowledge more broadly.

With the Asquithian Liberals ejected from office, Lloyd George's new government remained in denial over the severity of Britain's economic problem in the United States. Bonar Law's new responsibilities as Chancellor alerted him to the seriousness of the crisis, but he took no meaningful action. German and American moves for peace came soon after Lloyd George's ascent to power, but the new government simply sought to manoeuvre around them. British intelligence continued to serve Lloyd George poorly, sending him decrypts that again misled Lloyd George into believing that Germany and the United States were secretly collaborating. British intelligence also decrypted the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, but decided not to share it with the government. Arthur Balfour, the new Foreign Secretary, remained extremely anxious about Britain's economic position. He used a British intelligence officer in the United States, William Wiseman, to quietly keep alive the prospect of American mediation with House. House sought new negotiations between Germany and Britain via Wiseman and the German Ambassador. Germany announced a declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, ending House's negotiations.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of theories and empirics of recession and depression, reviewing Austrian, Keynesian, and monetarist financial theories, and secular stagnation approaches to economic slumps. It looks at international , national, and regional recessions and the different shapes of business cycles (V, U, L and W). The chapter also discusses international dimensions of slumps and the scope and limits for undertaking countercyclical policies.