Deflecting the crisis: Keynesianism, social movements, and United States hegemony

This dissertation elucidates the ideological, institutional, and social underpinnings of the US-sponsored Keynesian Consensus (emphasizing the formative period between the New Deal and the Korean War). It explores the relations among three historical processes: the proliferation of Keynesian precepts and initiatives (amidst the renovation of economic science and the institutionalization of national accounting); the accommodation of social movements (amidst the mounting fear of communism); and the solidification of US hegemony. Moving beyond Marxist analyses of the historic compromise between capital and labor, Fordism (i.e., mass production, wage planning, and mass consumption), and Taylorism (i.e., scientific management), it argues that the Keynesian Consensus can be conceptualized both as the unintended outcome of anticapitalist struggle and as the modus operandi of US hegemony.;Taking the capitalist world-system as its explanatory unit and the Keynesian Consensus as its data unit, this study contextualizes the US government's attempt to internationalize the New Deal---initially through the Marshall Plan in Western Europe and Truman's Point Four Program in the Third World and subsequently through economic, technical, and military assistance to non-communist countries. Accordingly, this inquiry explores the essential features of the postwar reconstruction: the attempt to direct working-class resistance in the West into the construction of welfare states; and the attempt to direct anticolonial, nationalist, and worker resistance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into the construction of developmental states. Troubled by the strength of the working-class movement in Western Europe (especially in strategically significant France), the United States insisted upon anticommunism as a precondition for aid under the Marshall Plan. Troubled by the threat of communism beyond the borders of Europe, the United States promoted Truman's Point Four Program as an impetus to peripheral development. With the division of the globe into two camps, US hegemony came to be defined by its capacity to recuperate diverse social movements through the diffusion of Keynesian doctrine and the distribution of economic, technical, and military assistance across the 'free world.'...