Postwar economic crises had a political basis and were crises of legitimacy for capital.

Evidence

From the liberal perspective, three ­factors empowered the domain of politics against that of the economy ­after the war. First, popu­lar sovereignty was strengthened by the generalization of universal male suffrage in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, making it more difficult to maintain the gold standard through domestic adjustments borne by ordinary ­people. Second, the war left a legacy of what liberals saw as misguided confidence in the power of governments to allocate resources. It is no coincidence that one of Hayek and Mises’s most impor­tant antagonists in Vienna was Otto Neurath, a man who had created a moneyless plan for the Bavarian Republic. Since the war, an economy directed by central authorities looked like a ­viable alternative. Third, the resolution of the war in the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain validated the idea that the nation was the most impor­tant category for organ­izing ­human affairs. To the group that would become the neoliberals, the era ­after 1918 was marked by an attempt to reestablish what they saw as the correct balance between the public world of government and the private world of property and contract. Concretely, this translated into a series of proj­ects of cap­i­tal­ist internationalism. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 113 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The problem was to reconstruct a hegemonic apparatus for these formerly passive and apolitical elements. It was impossible to achieve this without the use of force—which could not be “legal” force, etc. Since the complex of social relations was different in each state, the political methods of using force and the ways in which legal and illegal forces were combined had to be equally diverse. The greater the mass of the apolitical, the greater the part played by illegal forces has to be. The greater the politically organised and educated forces, the more it is necessary to “cover” the legal State, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 876 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 113; Postwar hegemony had to be rebuilt around masses newly stirred into chaotic movement. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 876; Interwar economic crisis was politically imposed, not merely financial — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 110

Related

• Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy (similarity 0.89)
• Interwar economic crisis was politically imposed, not merely financial (similarity 0.83)
• Postwar hegemony had to be rebuilt around masses newly stirred into chaotic movement. (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar class conflict, not nation-state formation, threatened capitalism most. (similarity 0.79)
• Postwar social reforms repoliticized private property and wages that war had decoupled from markets (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy #corroborates (0.82) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 113
• Postwar hegemony had to be rebuilt around masses newly stirred into chaotic movement. #expands (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 876