TY - CHAP AB - Abstract This chapter is a contribution to the intellectual history of the anxiety that full employment in the modern United States depended somehow on military spending. This discourse (conveniently abbreviated as “military Keynesianism”) is vaguely familiar, but its contours and transit still await a full study. The chapter shows the origins of the idea in the left-Keynesian milieu centered around Harvard’s Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s, with a particular focus on the diverse group that cowrote the 1938 stagnationist manifesto An Economic Program for American Democracy. After a discussion of how these young economists participated in the World War II mobilization, the chapter considers how questions of stagnation and military stimulus were marginalized during the years of the high Cold War, only to be revived by younger radicals. At the same time, it demonstrates the existence of a community of discourse that directly links the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s with the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and cuts across the division between left-wing social critique and liberal statecraft. VL - 37A SN - 978-1-78769-849-9, 978-1-78769-850-5/0743-4154 DO - 10.1108/S0743-41542019000037A004 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-41542019000037A004 AU - Barker Tim PY - 2019 Y1 - 2019/01/01 TI - Macroeconomic Consequences of Peace: American Radical Economists and the Problem of Military Keynesianism, 1938–1975 T2 - Including A Symposium on 50 Years of the Union for Radical Political Economics T3 - Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 11 EP - 29 Y2 - 2024/03/19 ER -