Comments on “The Ideological Origins of the Revolution in American Financial Policies”

Abstract

Professor Green sets forth a very interesting framework for his paper. His title and purpose are taken from Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Green states that his approach is based on that author’s following assumption: “To understand fully the action of our revolutionary ancestors we must see it first through their eyes, from within their ideological perspective, and then recognize where that ideology sometimes diverged from the economic and political reality of their day” (p. 220). Green then takes his “sermon text” (as he puts it—I would prefer “hypothesis”) from Keynes’s General Theory, to the effect that the ideas of past and often forgotten so-called academic scribblers are much more important than those of vested interests in determining the actions of authorities. I believe that a historian who uses this framework and hypothesis to examine changes in American financial policies is likely to provide economists with valuable insights. Before considering the extent to which Professor Green’s paper fulfills this expectation, I want to place the paper into a larger context of the alternative contributions of historical analysis for economic understanding.