History of Political Economy, annual supplement to vol.23, Economics and National Security.

• Author: Wolfson, Murray

Wearing his editorial hat, Craufurd Goodwin has done those of us who are both historians of economic thought and students of international conflict half - no - two-thirds of a favor by his complaint that national security economics has not been accorded the same status in academe as health or education economics. Economists themselves are partly to blame. The more parochial practitioners of the discipline cannot escape from marginal concepts that seem inapplicable to the discontinuity of war. They are unwilling to collaborate with behavioral disciplines like political science, which have less difficulty with a world in which all that is real may not be rational. As a result the surveys of classical (Goodwin) and neoclassical (Whitaker, Barber, Tarascio) literature from antiquity (Lowry) through World War I in this volume come up empty. To the mainstream, it seemed that general war was a negative sum enterprise which could not occur among rational actors. War could be understood only by the dissenting underworld of evolutionary and revolutionary economics-Veblen (Biddle and Samuels), Marx and Lenin (Davis) and Rostow (Lodewijks). Barber's account of "British and American Attempts to Comprehend the Nature of War 1910-20" is the most interesting of this genre. It recounts economists' efforts to understand how war was possible, as well as describing their service in World War I and the subsequent peace negotiations. It turns out that economists always have done defense economics, when the subject is defined within the small compass of allocation of resources and wartime finance. Leonard's account of the history of RAND continues the history of this sort of applied economic analysis through the Cold War.

An important omission in this roughly chronological account is a comprehensive treatment of Keynes. He, more than most, bridged the gap between the economic causes of war and the economics of its conduct. In its place we read a detailed account of the research efforts of the League of Nations in the thirties (de Marchi). To be sure Keynes's denunciation of the Versailles treaty is mentioned, but surely he deserves a more thorough treatment. It was he who realized that the mercantilist zero sum game of the Depression years had a certain myopic fiscal and monetary rationality that could only result in war. Keynes's thought dominated the post World War 11 world, through its contention that the beggar my neighbor economic drive to war could be...