The politics of liberal financial governance and the gold standard

This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles over monetary governance which involved significant constraints for capitalist investors. Its institutions helped establish a new structure for exerting control over finance. By resituating the gold standard in a broader historical perspective, I show how nineteenth-century monetary governance, far from leading to a retreat of the state, established in fact the foundations of a new form of state intervention: modern central banking.