Economic History and Nationalism

Abstract

In “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” written in 1934, the economist Frank Knight identified two tendencies—one towards gross inequality and the other towards new techniques of influence—that appeared to be leading to fascism in liberal democracies. Knight’s predictions were wrong in the 1930s. But his comments suggest interesting questions about economic history in a period of renewed nationalism, “intolerable insecurity,” and, in Knight’s words, “contempt for truth.”