In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy ponders the issue of how Western industrial societies overcame major challenges to political and economic stability in the twentieth century. Successive essays ask: what ideological messages did American influence transmit to Europe after World War I, then again after World War II? Did Nazis and Italian fascists share an economic ideology or impose a unique economic system in the interwar period and during World War II? How do their accomplishments stack up comparatively against those of the liberal democracies? After 1945, what was the relationship between concepts of productivity and class division? How have the major experiences of twentieth-century inflation arisen out of class and interest-group rivalry? Most generally, what has been the representation of interests in capitalist political economies?

Acknowledgments; Introduction: political economy and history; Part I. Ideology and Economics from World War I to Midcentury: 1. Society as factory; 2. The economics of fascism and Nazism; 3. The politics of productivity; 4. The two postwar eras and the conditions for stability in twentieth-century Western Europe; Part II. Collective Preferences and Public Outcomes: 5. The politics of inflation in the twentieth century; 6. 'Fictitious bonds ... of wealth and law': on the theory and practice of interest representation; Conclusion; Index.