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Discussing the demise of historical epochs is risky business. History is littered with the premature reports of one thing or another's extinction: John Maynard Keynes wrote an influential essay entitled "The End of Laissez-Faire" in 1926; two years later, Herbert Hoover declared that the United States was about to extinguish poverty; in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan announced the passing of the mixed economy; and in the 1990s, Bill Clinton announced the end of both the era of big government and "welfare as we know it." Obviously, it pays to be cautious and specific in writing such obituaries. The postwar period is over, but the political economy of growth will continue to play out and will undoubtedly evolve in the future in ways that will surprise us. The pursuit of growth has changed, but it has hardly been ended. History seldom admits of final punctuation in such matters. It therefore behooves us to keep the past in mind even as we move ahead. Mark Twain once wrote that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. One good reason for studying the past is to make ourselves more sensitive to these rhyming patterns. Attention to the historical record sharpens our perceptual acuity: it extends the range of our hearing and enhances our ability to discern not only the rhythms of the past but also the rustlings in our own day. To have the proverbial "sense of history" is to have an acquaintance with how things happened yesterday and, thus, an informed "feel" for how they might happen today and tomorrow.

With Twain's observation in mind, it is useful to consider four fundamental conclusions that emerge from the present study: first, that the pursuit of exuberant economic growth was central to the history of the postwar period; second, that growthmanship was protean, serving not simply as an end in itself but also to advance a strikingly variable array of other purposes; third, that the process of policymaking for growth was complex in ways that defy some of the conventional wisdom about the workings of political economy; and fourth, that, as a historical phenomenon, the pursuit of growth proved to be much more tricky and dangerous in its execution and consequences than policymakers anticipated.

Regarding centrality, the history of postwar America can be viewed, profitably if not exclusively, in terms of a succession of growth regimes, running from the initial formulation of growthmanship in the 1940s through the ascendancy of a full-blown growth liberalism in the 1960s, Richard Nixon's embrace of growth for the purposes of national rejuvenation in the aftermath of the 1960s, the retreat from growth under both economic and cultural pressures in the 1970s, the reassertion and partisan domestication of growth by Ronald Reagan and the Republicans in the 1980s, and the emergence of a diluted but still influential technocratic brand of growthmanship in the 1990s. Looking at the recent past in this way, we learn important particulars from all of these individual episodes -- the shift from scarcity to abundance as the United States emerged from the Great Depression and World War II, the aspirations and problems of liberals who sought to redefine their creed to take advantage of the new economic environment, the complex nature of both Richard Nixon and his presidency, the causes and symptoms of the national malaise of the 1970s, and so on -- but we also find among these episodes skeins and connections that serve to tell a larger story about how the struggle to achieve greater growth and the failure to do so influenced both the political economy and the larger contours of postwar American history. An examination of the political economy of 1968 illustrates how intertwined economic affairs were with the other significant domestic and international currents of the day. Neither such particular episodes nor the bigger story they tell stand as the whole of postwar American history, but they do, arguably, lie near the center of that history. We ignore them at our peril.

The centrality of growthmanship in all its various manifestations also raises the issue of historical dynamics. What drove American political history in the postwar era? Many commentators argue that the postwar political culture has been shaped most profoundly by cultural and social issues. In 1970, Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon published The Real Majority, in which they advanced not only a seminal interpretation of voting behavior in the 1960s but a general theory of the elections as well. They argued that politics was driven increasingly by what they labeled "the social issue," matters of cultural values and social behavior that had become coequal with economic concerns in determining the shape of the American political landscape. Their argument was powerful and their insight has since exerted an important influence on how Americans think about their political system and how politicians seek election and behave in office. Michael Barone recently reiterated the point, writing that "in the United States politics more often divides Americans along cultural than along economic lines."

Surely Wattenberg, Scammon, and Barone are right in contending that cultural politics matter. One wonders, however, whether their insight has not been embraced too fervently, leaving us with a one-dimensional way of thinking about public affairs that now overemphasizes the cultural determinants of political life and loses sight of the enduring, albeit never exclusive, significance of such "traditional" concerns as political economy. If much political behavior, especially electoral behavior, is determined by cultural issues -- and who, in the heyday of identity politics, can doubt that? -- public policy, a slightly but significantly different aspect of civic culture, continues to be dictated directly and influenced indirectly by the substance of political economy. The overlap among economics, politics, and policy has indeed mattered, not just in the 1992 election ("The economy, stupid") but throughout the postwar period.

The present study's second overarching conclusion is that the growthmanship we have traced was strikingly protean. Growth was pursued as a goal in its own right in a variety of theoretical and practical ways. Some sought to achieve it via policies directed at the demand side; others relied on supply-side initiatives. These approaches differed in both their conceptual underpinnings and their practical implications. Most significant, leaders and policymakers pursued growth as a means of achieving a striking variety of other ends. Postwar liberals saw growth as the vehicle for transformative social change; Richard Nixon viewed growth as a way to overcome the ravages of liberal decay. Jimmy Carter looked upon balanced growth as a way to accommodate a new era of limits; Ronald Reagan considered unbounded growth a way to transcend limits and at the same time arrest the drift toward a European-style social democracy. Throughout, growth politics took a variety of forms for a variety of purposes: domestic liberal reform, conservative restoration, world leadership and international influence, global economic preeminence, national moral rehabilitation, and simple political success and electoral victory.

Growth promised a way to solve old problems and to advance new ideological agendas. It offered both a way to achieve these ends and a way to legitimate them. The historian Ellis Hawley, in his classic study of the political economy of the New Deal, noted that one key to effective cartelization in the 1930s was the ability of those who sought government sanction for their self-interested restrictionist arrangements to wrap their cause in a politically attractive symbol or value. Farmers sought to increase their group market power in the name of soil conservation; union workers did the same in the name of social justice; independent retailers sought protection from price-cutting chains in the name of defending small-town America's way of life; the giant oil companies that set production quotas claimed to be conserving a vital natural resource.

During the New Deal years, concepts such as conservation, competition, social justice, and something as amorphous as "the American way of life" often served to advance, and sometimes to disguise, other purposes, which themselves varied greatly in their political, economic, and moral content. In the postwar period, growth was added to the list, as both liberals and conservatives sought to transform the political culture and used the cause of economic growth to both further and legitimate their efforts. The striking characteristic of all such symbols, economic growth included, was their plasticity, the fact that they could be reshaped, molded, and used for a variety of vastly different ideological purposes. A lesson suggested by Hawley's work and reinforced by the present study is that any claim based on, or justified by, such symbols deserves careful scrutiny by citizen and scholar alike.

In this and other ways, the pursuit of growth in the postwar has also been more complex than some formulas for making sense of the modern political economy have allowed. In the oft-quoted concluding lines of The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes wrote that "the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . Sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil." We have seen proof throughout our story that ideas do have consequences -- but not in the inexorable, rather simple fashion implied by Keynes.

The results of the various efforts to push the pace of economic growth were on several occasions nothing short of pernicious. Growth liberalism helped engineer the longest economic expansion to that point and underwrote one of the most fruitful episodes of social reform in American history, but it also encouraged an overreach that contributed significantly to the American debacle in Vietnam, that excited expectations of reform at home that any administration would have been hard-pressed to fulfill, and that planted the seeds of an inflation that would plague the U.S. economy for a generation. Richard Nixon's Whig growthmanship, which he hoped would lead the nation into a new post-Cold War era while undoing the spiritual damage of the 1960s, instead exacerbated the inflationary legacy he had inherited and contributed to the onset of a ruinous stagflation that weakened national institutions in ways that would reverberate to the end of the century. Nixon's failure ushered in a painful period of drift and uncertainty that in turn prepared the way for the risorgimento growthmanship of Ronald Reagan.

The so-called Reagan Revolution finally squeezed most of the inflationary energy out of the economy, at the cost of the most serious recession of the postwar years, and encouraged the beginning of a long-term restructuring of the economy that would later yield substantial efficiencies. In addition, the expansiveness of Reaganomics encouraged a national security posture that arguably contributed to the Western victory in the Cold War. Once again, however, the costs of these gains were considerable: at the very least, a failure to arrest the dramatic surge in inequality resulting from technological change and global economic competition, together with the generation of gigantic budget deficits, the overhang from which effectively ruled out any new governmental efforts to address pressing national needs -- this more a defect in liberal than conservative eyes -- and which in themselves came ultimately to dampen growth and constitute an acute problem for subsequent policyrnakers. To be sure, postwar economic growth enriched the lives of Americans in ways so fundamental and pervasive that they are easy to overlook. But the unintended costs of the crusades for exuberant growth that we have examined were manifestly real and considerable as well.

There is reason to believe that policymakers have at last recognized, at least for a season, that such crusades bring with them danger as well as promise. The emphasis on the sustainability of growth at century's end reflects this hard-won knowledge. Under Clinton, the pursuit of growth has approached the sort of practical problem-solving-by-deft-technique that Keynes had in mind when, in a fit of unusual but admirable professional humility, he declared that economists ought to be like dentists. The history of growthmanship in the postwar era confirms the great theoretician's point.

Yet it remains true that the acceptance of limits in the pursuit of growth brings its own painful consequences. Growth has often been America's "out" -- the way, many believed, that the nation could somehow square the circle and reconcile its love of liberty with its egalitarian pretensions. . .

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