The Combatants

This study is largely organised around the intellectual and institutional battles between the IMF and the influence of Milton Friedman. It focuses on the process by which the defenders of a par value system were confronted by an academic heretic who, having nailed his theses (first in Germany, just as a predecessor had done four and quarter centuries before) tenaciously pursued his heresy. Friedman’s intellectual rebellion against ‘papal’ authority invoked the right of national economic sovereignty, and after almost ‘30 years’ of intellectual and political schism, the 1976 ‘Treaty’ of Jamaica resembled the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia in terms of the toleration offered to heretical floaters.