Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The awarding of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in history to Liaquat Ahamed for Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009) brings to full circle the great revolution in thinking on how monetary issues, specifically international monetary issues, were central to the causes of the Great Depression. This revolution has been ensuing for some half a century. Its clarion was Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States (1963) , which at this remove is clearly the most consequential book in economics since the General Theory . If there was one other landmark book in this general tradition, it was Barry Eichengreen's Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression (1992) . The important deliberations of economics, including the seeds of its revolutions, characteristically can be found within journals. And yet it was with these monographs that a new consensus was established. The same may be said for Keynesianism itself. Its lineaments made for a complex root structure in the literature by 1936, and yet but for the General Theory it is difficult to see how Keynesianism could have existed. The general thrust of the revolution in macroeconomic historiography with regard to the Great Depression is that the Depression is not, in fact, best understood as having emerged on account of some crisis of capitalism, in whole or in part. ... log in or subscribe to read full text