Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the three structural causes that, in liberal eyes, empowered politics over economy after WWI.
• QUESTION: The claim that universal suffrage made the gold standard harder to maintain warrants follow-up — how exactly did democratization force abandonment of gold discipline?
• XREF: connects to: Postwar reconstructionists reversed the priority of fiscal economy over political aims — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 181; Economic growth weakened political factors and made economic capacity the modern prerequisite of power — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 179; Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 174 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Industrial growth subordinated political power to economic capacity #contradicts (0.85)
• Economic growth weakened political factors and made economic capacity the modern prerequisite of power #contradicts (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 179
• Unequal treaties prefigured neoliberal empire without formal territorial control #corroborates (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 262
• Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics #contradicts (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193
• State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war #corroborates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 186
• Working-class freedom demanded economic not merely political democracy after World War I #corroborates (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1667
• Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system #corroborates (0.70) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174