Abstract
Many anthropologists interpret neoliberalism as a radical break from and dangerous
rupture in post-war societies that featured Keynesian economic policies and welfare
provision. The allure of a mythic welfare state has boosted John Maynard Keynes’s
popularity to many who embrace certain facets of socialism. Many critical social scientists
have embraced Keynesianism in ways that overlook how the US used Keynesian
policies to reengineer and redeploy state power. Keynes’s liberal synthesis inspired
managers in the US Treasury Department to understand depression-era problems of
unemployment and poverty in ways that were consonant with the expansion of corporate
power. For understanding Keynesianism, as it actually existed during the Cold
War, we must analyse how the US Treasury and State Departments used Keynesian
principles to rebuild the social reproductive capacities necessary for capitalist accumulation
both domestically and in Western Europe. I focus on how the architects of postwar
capitalism used full employment policies, labour laws and welfare provision to
renovate the nexus of political practices and institutional structures in ways that
formed a benevolent and caring image of ‘the state’ and the myth of a class compromise.
Through these reforms, governmental planners and administrators used the ‘state
idea’ to reorganize capital accumulation as if the post-war economy would represent
ordinary people’s best interests. In the process, these sophisticated practices of power
became reified as the ‘welfare state’ and the ‘Keynesian compromise’ in ways that
endow these institutions and policies with a character divorced from practices of power.
The post-war state embodied a dialectic of repression and reform that combined
criminalizing dissent with full employment policies and welfare provision. Taking
these aspects of power into account, we can see post-war Keynesianism in ways that
inspire a robust and far-reaching criticism of the contemporary predicament of economic
uncertainty, political instability and environmental degradation.