Keynes, Keynesianism, and International Economic Thinking

• Department of History

This multidisciplinary workshop, organised in the framework of the ERC-funded ECOINT project, explores the place of Keynes and Keynesianism in 20th-century international economic thinking.

John Maynard Keynes and "Keynesianism" are everywhere in the history of national and international economic thinking. The man and his ideas are commonly used as the means of characterising and identifying a range of economic ideas across the 20th century and diverse linguistic and political domains. This multidisciplinary workshop examines selected case studies of the "spectre of Keynes" in international trade and economic debates. Several recent ground-breaking studies have used Keynes' writings on monetary and trade policy to reassess the imperial origins and technocratic legacies of the League of Nations and the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. Historians have reflected less on how we might characterise the range of "Keynesianisms" that shaped the 'international' and the 'transnational' before and after Keynes' death in 1946. The "spectre of Keynes" has cast a homogenising shadow across our understanding of the circulation of economic theories and practices typically associated with Keynes and Keynesian economists, as well as how Keynes' intellectual authority was often rhetorically invoked to justify dissimilar re-imaginations of the international economic order.