Alongside capital controls, Bretton Woods established an international framework for the domestic interventionist policies of the Fordist regime of “embedded liberalism.” One could argue that this was the international institutionalization of what Hayek had criticized as “monetary nationalism” since the 1930s—the idea that an autonomous and democratic monetary policy was possible within the boundaries of nation-states. Keynesianism and monetary nationalism were “built into the international postwar order,” Hayek claimed in his only publication on these questions during the Bretton Woods era. In the view of Hayek and many of his colleagues from the MPS, the Bretton Woods system practically forced governments on a path of inflationary and expansionist monetary policy, which in turn leads to an expansion of the state apparatus and increases the danger of collectivist and totalitarian developments.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 424