Presenting the future: the Irish Social Credit movement 1932-1941

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dc.check.chapterOfThesisWhole Thesisen
dc.check.date2034-05-31
dc.check.infoControlled Access
dc.contributor.advisorMcCarthy, Andrew
dc.contributor.authorWarren, Gordonen
dc.contributor.funderUniversity College Cork
dc.date.accessioned2024-02-07T12:30:34Z
dc.date.available2024-02-07T12:30:34Z
dc.date.issued2023
dc.date.submitted2023
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation examines the monetary reform proposals tendered by the Irish Social Credit movement in the 1930s and early 1940s. The phenomenon of monetary reform constitutes an understudied aspect of Irish economic history and in focusing on the monetary reform proposals of the Financial Freedom Federation (latterly the Irish Social Credit Party, henceforth FFF/ISCP) I contend that, notwithstanding the fact that professional economists tended to give Social Credit a wide berth, aspects of the FFF/ISCP programme for reform were more forward looking than the literature gives them credit for being and are, therefore, worthy of revaluation. By monetary reform I mean alternative proposals for issuing money and financing the economy than the conventional debt-based model. Social Credit, an economic doctrine developed in the Interwar years by an obscure British engineer, Clifford Hugh Douglas, in collaboration with feted British intellectual, Alfred Richard Orage, became the preeminent monetary reform theory in circulation in Britain and Ireland after the 1929 crash when the world experienced an acute and prolonged economic depression. The Irish Social Credit movement, which numbered Maud Gonne MacBride amongst its foremost campaigners, has received scant to no attention in the literature to date. Indeed, save for a short and impressionistic treatment of the movement in Ray Douglas’ 2009 work Architects of the Resurrection, the literature is silent on this phenomenon. The objective of the monetary innovations proffered by the Irish Social Credit movement was the removal of money creation from the hands of the banking system and making it a sovereign prerogative (democracy in a substantive sense). Although not especially numerous, the movement succeeded in attracting large crowds to their rallies and in alerting the general public to the possibility of alternate methods of stimulating the economy. Herein, I detail the forward-looking aspects of the FFF/ISCP’s monetary reform proposals arguing that the FFF/ISCP was significantly ahead of future economic developments in advocating a nascent form of basic income in the form of the National Dividend and in identifying a democratic deficit in permitting democratically unaccountable institutions a near monopoly on the supply of credit. All too often, we are apt to dismiss proposals for social and economic reform that emanate from traditions we might label as ‘suspect’ or ‘other’ not comprehending the assumptions that underpin them. This dissertation will elucidate some of the assumptions underpinning the FFF/ISCP proposals in the hope that it will be of value in assisting us in assessing the viability of the proposals for economic and monetary reform propounded by this hitherto substantially neglected entity.en
dc.description.statusNot peer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationWarren, G. 2023. Presenting the future: the Irish Social Credit movement 1932-1941. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.
dc.identifier.endpage229
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/15507
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity College Corken
dc.relation.projectUniversity College Cork (School of History, Michael Joseph McEnery Memorial Scholarship)
dc.rights© 2023, Gordon Warren.
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectSocial Credit
dc.subjectBasic income
dc.subjectMajor Douglas
dc.subjectCatholic action
dc.titlePresenting the future: the Irish Social Credit movement 1932-1941
dc.typeDoctoral thesisen
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoralen
dc.type.qualificationnamePhD - Doctor of Philosophyen
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