Australia's Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s

Abstract

In the 1940s across much of the world there was a collective determination to build new social forms in place of those that had nurtured depression, fascism and two rounds of global military conflict in one generation. The mood was cross-class in form rather than a repeat of the proletarian revolutionary movements that mushroomed after the First World War, though in postwar national elections socialist, communist and labour parties were the main political beneficiaries. This was ‘postwar reconstruction’. In the spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s/1940s United States, without undermining the capitalist order but generating a larger role for state intervention, it led to less apocalypt..