Stanford economics professor Joseph S. Davis commended Brussels as a "conference of specialists in fi nancial disease." Th eir assembly "for diagnosis of the acute illness of the nations" was a victory, Davis argued, in that the attendees reached "unanimous agreement upon the main points of a diagnosis and upon the mode of treatment appropriate to the present stages of the disease" (Davis 1920, 350). Davis's claim of a unanimous agreement was centered less on international cooperation than on austerity. Or better, international cooperation found useful expression in austerity, with the latter silencing the powerful enemies of capital accumulation and foreclosing any noncapitalist alternatives of postwar reconstruction, including projects for economic democracy.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 672