The Politics of Liberal Financial Governance and the Gold Standard

Samuel Knafo

New Political Economy, 2013, vol. 18, issue 1, 43-63

Abstract: This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles over monetary governance which involved significant constraints for capitalist investors. Its institutions helped establish a new structure for exerting control over finance. By resituating the gold standard in a broader historical perspective, I show how nineteenth-century monetary governance, far from leading to a retreat of the state, established in fact the foundations of a new form of state intervention: modern central banking.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2012.656083 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:18:y:2013:i:1:p:43-63

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cnpe20

DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2012.656083

Access Statistics for this article

New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay

More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().