Introduction: The Main Political Economy Features of the Weimar Republic

Adopting a Political Economy approach, Pittaluga and Seghezza offer a substantive rethinking of the economics of the Weimar Republic and its relationship with the politics of the period. Typically, economic analyses of the Weimar economy have focused on dramatic but apparently isolated episodes such as the hyperinflation of 1923 or the 1931 crisis. Pittaluga and Seghezza, on the other hand, show how these dramatic events were the outcomes of economic policy choices dictated by politics. According to the authors, both the inflation of the early Twenties and the massive capital flows of the second half of the 1920s (which were at the root of the 1931 crisis) were the result of strategies adopted to mitigate the potentially devastating social conflict that threatened the Republic’s existence.