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Over the late 1970s, U.S. macroeconomic policy underwent a major shift, rejecting incomes policies and accepting macroeconomic restraint as the primary means to holding down inflation and strengthening the dollar. In conventional narratives, this shift is cast as a response to the diminishing effectiveness of incomes policies and the fundamental importance of macroeconomic restraint in maintaining monetary stability. However, such accounts obscure the interpretive context in which these shifts occurred, as beliefs regarding the limits of incomes policies and the need for restraint took on "lives of their own." In this paper, I examine the intersubjective context of these policy shifts, addressing not only the domestic context of debates over wage-price trends, but also German pressure on U.S. policy, and the key influence of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in urging U.S. oil deregulation and monetary restraint. I specifically highlight interactions in the context of the 1977 London and 1978 Bonn summits and the 1979 World Bank-IMF meetings. Taken as a whole, this effort highlights the intersubjective context of domestic-systemic debates, as liberalizing pressures reflected not only domestic pressures from within U.S. society but also external German influences, as together mediated by key U.S. policymakers., ********** In the late 1970s, as the Democratic Carter administration confronted intensifying trade-offs between price stability and full employment--and so between dollar stability and growth--the U.S. abandoned the use of [...]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2007.00474.x Byline: Wesley W. Widmaier (*), Mark Blyth ([dagger]), Leonard Seabrooke ([double dagger]) Abstract: This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing 'War on Terror,' and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested-if evolving-neoliberal 'Washington Consensus.' This volatility exceeds any underlying shifts in economic structures or the distribution of capabilities, and raises important questions regarding the roles of agency, uncertainty, and ideas in advancing change. In this introduction we examine the role of wars and economic crises as socially constructed openings for change. We attempt three things: to critique materialist approaches in the security and political economy issue areas, to outline the distinctive contribution that an agent-centered constructivist understanding of such events offers, and to offer a framework for the study of such events, one which highlights an expanded range of elite-mass interactions. Author Affiliation: (*)St. Joseph's University ([dagger])Johns Hopkins University ([double dagger])Copenhagen Business School and The Australian National University

In recent years, scholarly concern for ‘great transformations’ has yielded to a stress on ‘gradual transitions'. In thiscontribution, I offer a discursive institutionalist model of the shifts in ideational power which drive order construction, consolidation and crisis. First, I argue that leaders exercise rhetorical power through ideas, employing communicative appeals to shape principled beliefs. Second, I argue that élites employ epistemic power over ideas to consolidate intellectual consensus. Finally, I posit that as structural power in ideas assumes a life of its own, this breeds overconfidence and crisis. Empirically, I then track the development of the neoliberal order over Reagan's and Thatcher's use of power through ideas in constructing principled restraints on the market power of labour, Clinton- and Blair-era efforts to concentrate power over ideas in central banks, and the structural power of New Keynesian ideas that obscured concentrations of financial power, culminating in the global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]