Political Economics and the Weimar Disaster

Abstract

The Allied leaders who produced the Treaty of Versailles and the German leaders who created the Weimar constitution relied significantly on the theoretical expertise of John Maynard Keynes and Max Weber respectively. It is argued here that integrated analytical approaches to the study of political and economic competition, which have been developed with game-theoretic methodology since the time of Keynes and Weber, can offer a valuable perspective to better understand the decisions that faced the leaders of Weimar and Versailles.