The trajectory of modern economic thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been decisively shaped by the oscillations between Keynesianism, Neoliberalism, and the evolving body of Post-Keynesian critiques. These theoretical frameworks are not to be understood as abstract exercises in economic reasoning detached from material reality. Rather, they emerge as historically situated responses to profound systemic contradictions within capitalism—contradictions of accumulation, governance, legitimacy, and crisis management. Each paradigm arose at a particular conjuncture when prevailing orthodoxies proved inadequate to resolve mounting tensions, and each left its imprint not only on academic debates but also on institutional practices, policy regimes, and the lived realities of social reproduction. In this sense, they stand as successive intellectual codifications of the struggles to contain or redirect capitalism’s inherent instabilities.
When examined through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, these paradigms appear not as linear progressions or mutually exclusive doctrines, but as distinct phases in the dialectical quantization of capitalism’s contradictions. The economy, like a quantum system, is continually shaped by the tension between forces of cohesion, which stabilize and integrate, and forces of decohesion, which disrupt, fragment, and destabilize. Each paradigm represents a momentary configuration of these contradictory dynamics: a temporary equilibrium that both resolves and generates tensions, before inevitably giving way to new forms of disequilibrium. Keynesianism, emerging out of the Great Depression, embodied a form of cohesion through its synthesis of state intervention with market mechanisms, creating a framework for stability, growth, and social compromise. Neoliberalism, arising from the crisis of the Keynesian order in the 1970s, radicalized decohesion through its emphasis on deregulation, privatization, and financialization, unraveling older structures of economic and social integration. Post-Keynesian critiques, developed in dialogue with both traditions, seek to reopen the field by exposing unresolved contradictions, highlighting the instabilities of finance, and gesturing toward new possibilities of systemic coherence that transcend the limitations of both Keynesian orthodoxy and neoliberal dogma.
The purpose of this article is to reinterpret these movements not merely as economic schools of thought but as dialectical condensations of material contradictions, illuminated through the categories of Quantum Dialectics. By employing concepts such as cohesion and decohesion, layered contradictions, dynamic equilibrium, and emergent transformation, it becomes possible to understand Keynesianism, Neoliberalism, and Post-Keynesianism as successive expressions of capitalism’s contradictory motion. Each paradigm is thus not only an intellectual intervention but also an instance of systemic quantization, where contradictions are temporarily stabilized, intensified, or reconfigured, ultimately preparing the ground for new phases of economic and political transformation.
Keynesianism emerged in the interwar years as a direct response to the catastrophic breakdown of classical political economy during the Great Depression. The laissez-faire doctrines that had dominated economic orthodoxy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proved incapable of explaining, let alone resolving, the persistence of mass unemployment, falling investment, and systemic stagnation. It was in this context that John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, advancing the radical claim that capitalist markets were not inherently self-correcting equilibria. Rather, they were unstable systems prone to chronic underemployment, structural inefficiencies, and recurrent crises. The revolutionary implication of Keynes’ analysis was that active state intervention was indispensable to restore and maintain stability. Through instruments such as public investment, deficit spending, and demand management, the state could counteract the destructive oscillations of the business cycle and sustain levels of output and employment that markets, left to themselves, could not guarantee.
From the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, Keynesianism can be understood as a moment of cohesive reconfiguration within capitalism. It mobilized the state as an integrative force capable of counterbalancing the decohesive tendencies inherent in unregulated markets—those tendencies toward speculative volatility, unemployment, and social dislocation. Cohesion, in this sense, did not operate at a single level of analysis but expressed itself across multiple quantum layers of the socio-economic system. At the household layer, Keynesian welfare policies and employment programs stabilized incomes and anchored consumption. At the corporate layer, government demand management reassured investors by reducing uncertainty and guaranteeing outlets for production. At the national layer, Keynesianism fostered new social contracts institutionalized through welfare states, collective bargaining, and progressive taxation, thereby weaving cohesion into the political as well as the economic fabric of society. Finally, at the global layer, the Bretton Woods system institutionalized stability through fixed exchange rates, capital controls, and international financial institutions, constructing a framework that mitigated the decohesive volatility of global capital flows.
The three decades following World War II—often referred to as the “Golden Age of Capitalism” (1945–1973)—illustrated the material power of this Keynesian dialectical equilibrium. Economic growth was robust, unemployment levels were historically low, productivity rose steadily, and social inequality narrowed in many advanced capitalist economies. Cohesion appeared to dominate, securing not only economic expansion but also legitimacy for the capitalist system in the wake of war and depression. Yet, in quantum dialectical terms, this equilibrium was never static or final. Beneath its apparent stability, decohesive contradictions accumulated over time. Profit rates began to fall under conditions of rising wage demands and productivity slowdowns, producing the profit squeeze that haunted late-Keynesian economies. The rigidities of institutionalized welfare systems clashed with globalizing markets, while the oil shocks of the 1970s exposed vulnerabilities to external shocks. Stagflation—simultaneous inflation and unemployment—undermined the very foundations of Keynesian demand management, while the structural problem of overaccumulation revealed capitalism’s tendency to generate crises from within.
Thus, while Keynesianism constituted a historically effective synthesis of state and market forces, in dialectical perspective it also prepared the ground for its own negation. The very instruments of cohesion that stabilized capitalism in the postwar decades generated tensions that could not be resolved within its framework, opening the way for a new paradigm—neoliberalism—that would radicalize decohesion in the name of market freedom.
.Neoliberalism emerged during the 1970s as the historical negation of Keynesian cohesion, catalyzed by the intertwined crises of stagflation, declining profitability, and intensifying global competition. The Keynesian welfare state, once celebrated as a model of stability, appeared increasingly unable to resolve mounting contradictions, particularly the simultaneous occurrence of high inflation and high unemployment. Into this breach stepped intellectual and political forces that reasserted the primacy of markets as the only reliable mechanism of coordination. Thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman denounced state intervention as inherently distortive, corrupting the supposed efficiency of price signals and undermining individual freedom. Their arguments resonated with emerging political projects in the late twentieth century, most prominently Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the United States, which operationalized neoliberal doctrines through sweeping programs of deregulation, privatization, financial liberalization, and austerity. These measures redefined the state’s role, not as an agent of cohesion, but as an enforcer of market discipline and protector of capital’s mobility.
From the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, neoliberalism represents a decisive phase shift toward systemic decohesion. Where Keynesianism had mobilized the state as a stabilizing force, neoliberalism deliberately sought to weaken cohesive institutions, dismantle welfare protections, and accelerate the unrestrained circulation of capital on a global scale. This logic of decoherence manifested across multiple quantum layers of the socio-economic order. At the household layer, neoliberal restructuring generated precarity by dismantling job security, eroding social safety nets, and encouraging debt-driven consumption as a substitute for stagnant wages. At the corporate layer, the shift toward shareholder value orientation encouraged short-term speculative accumulation, transforming firms into vehicles of financial engineering rather than long-term productive investment. At the national layer, states experienced an erosion of sovereignty as global capital mobility constrained fiscal and monetary autonomy, subjecting domestic policies to the imperatives of international markets. At the global layer, neoliberalism entrenched dollar hegemony, facilitated recurrent financial crises, and deepened uneven development between core and peripheral economies.
The ideological triumph of neoliberalism lay in its ability to present this radical project of decohesion as the restoration of a “natural order.” Market liberalization was framed not as a deliberate political project, but as a return to timeless economic truths—freedom, efficiency, and competition—thus masking the extent to which neoliberalism represented a profound restructuring of social relations. Yet, by absolutizing market freedom and disembedding economic activity from its social foundations, neoliberalism did not resolve capitalism’s contradictions; it amplified them. Rising inequality, recurring financial instability, ecological destruction, and political fragmentation became systemic features of neoliberal globalization. The crises of the 1980s debt collapse, the 1997 Asian financial meltdown, and the 2008 global crash exemplify how neoliberalism, in the pursuit of liberating capital, entrenched conditions of chronic vulnerability and periodic systemic breakdowns.
In terms of Quantum Dialectics, neoliberalism must be understood as a regime of over-decohesion. By dismantling stabilizing structures and unleashing unchecked capital flows, it disrupted the delicate balance of cohesive and decohesive forces that sustains systemic viability. What emerged was not dynamic equilibrium but chronic instability—a global order in which the contradictions of accumulation, reproduction, and ecology intensify with each crisis cycle. In this sense, neoliberalism marks not the end of Keynesian contradictions but their transformation into a new, more volatile phase of capitalism’s dialectical unfolding.
Post-Keynesianism, which began to take shape in the mid-twentieth century, does not represent a simple revival of Keynesian orthodoxy but rather a critical sublation of its insights into a new theoretical horizon. Where mainstream economics—whether in the form of the neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis or later neoliberal dogma—tended to domesticate and dilute Keynes’ radical contributions, Post-Keynesian thinkers sought to recover and extend their transformative potential. Figures such as Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Hyman Minsky, and more recently proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), advanced a set of arguments that reoriented the analysis of capitalist economies around uncertainty, demand, money, and finance. They argued that both the neoclassical synthesis and neoliberalism distorted Keynes’ legacy by reintroducing equilibrium-centered assumptions and by neglecting the deep structural instabilities of capitalist accumulation. Against these currents, Post-Keynesianism emphasized fundamental uncertainty, the primacy of effective demand, the endogenous nature of money creation, and the destabilizing tendencies of finance as central features of economic life.
Viewed through the framework of Quantum Dialectics, Post-Keynesian critiques can be understood as an effort to restore dynamic equilibrium between cohesion and decohesion in capitalist systems. They highlight the fact that economic life is not governed by deterministic equilibria but by processes of contradiction, instability, and emergent transformation. Several key insights stand out. First, uncertainty functions as a kind of quantum indeterminacy: economic actors make decisions under conditions of radical unknowability, where probabilities cannot be reliably assigned and outcomes are inherently open-ended. This stands in stark contrast to the equilibrium determinism of neoclassical models. Second, Post-Keynesians such as Minsky demonstrate that finance operates as a decohesive amplifier: speculative borrowing and investment cycles tend to escalate until they reach points of systemic fragility, where minor shocks can quantize into crises that destabilize the entire economy. Third, the Post-Keynesian understanding of endogenous money embodies a layered contradiction: credit creation by banks can stabilize accumulation in the short run by financing investment and consumption, but it simultaneously plants the seeds of instability by encouraging leverage, speculation, and debt overhangs. Finally, Post-Keynesians emphasize policy as a strategy of re-cohesion, advocating public employment programs, progressive taxation, financial regulation, and sovereign monetary control as means to counteract the destabilizing pressures of unregulated markets.
In this sense, Post-Keynesianism emerges as a kind of quantum correction to both Keynesianism and neoliberalism. To Keynesianism, it offers a more radical understanding of uncertainty and finance, rejecting any complacency about the self-stabilizing capacity of state-market arrangements. To neoliberalism, it stands as a direct critique, exposing how the pursuit of unbridled market freedom intensifies systemic fragility and amplifies contradictions rather than resolving them. By re-centering economic theory on contradiction management rather than equilibrium faith, Post-Keynesianism resonates strongly with the dialectical insight that systems remain viable only through the continual negotiation of cohesion and decohesion.
Thus, from a quantum dialectical perspective, Post-Keynesian thought should be seen not as a final resolution but as a transitional effort to recalibrate the balance of forces within capitalism. It insists that systemic stability cannot rest upon automatic equilibria or ideological appeals to market naturalness; it must be actively produced, contested, and continually reconfigured. In this recognition lies its enduring significance: Post-Keynesianism gestures toward a deeper understanding of political economy as a dynamic and contradictory field, one that requires perpetual intervention to prevent collapse and that opens the possibility of transformative reorganization beyond the limits of the capitalist order.
When viewed through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, the historical passage from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, and the subsequent emergence of Post-Keynesian critiques, can be understood as an illustration of the quantization of systemic contradictions within political economy. Each paradigm corresponds to a distinct configuration of the balance between cohesive and decohesive forces, with each phase representing a historically specific attempt to stabilize contradictions that are never finally resolvable. In the mid-twentieth century, Keynesianism embodied a cohesion-dominant equilibrium, stabilizing capitalist economies through the synthesis of state planning and market mechanisms. By contrast, the rise of neoliberalism marked a shift toward decohesion-dominant disequilibrium, privileging market fundamentalism and the unrestrained mobility of capital at the expense of institutional stability and social integration. The emergence of Post-Keynesianism represents an effort at emergent synthesis, an attempt to restore layered coherence by critically addressing unresolved contradictions in both the Keynesian and neoliberal regimes.
This dialectical movement is not to be conceived as a linear progression from one stage to another, but rather as a recursive process of intensification, breakdown, and reconfiguration. Contradictions within a given paradigm accumulate until they overwhelm the system’s capacity for cohesion, at which point a qualitative shift occurs. Keynesianism, for instance, was undermined by stagflation, fiscal strains, and global competition, paving the way for neoliberal restructuring. Neoliberalism, in turn, is destabilized by recurrent crises of financialization, mounting inequality, and ecological destruction. From this perspective, the crises of neoliberalism do not signal mere policy failures, but rather the dialectical necessity of systemic transformation. Post-Keynesian thought offers important correctives by reintroducing attention to uncertainty, finance, and endogenous money, yet its vision largely remains confined within the institutional and structural parameters of capitalism itself.
Here, Quantum Dialectics advances a deeper resolution. It suggests that the fundamental contradiction is not merely between different modes of regulation—Keynesian or neoliberal—but between capital accumulation and social reproduction as antagonistic logics. Capital accumulation, driven by the imperative of profit maximization and competitive expansion, systematically undermines the ecological, social, and political conditions upon which its reproduction depends. Social reproduction, by contrast, demands cohesion in the form of stable livelihoods, ecological sustainability, and collective institutions. The inability to reconcile these logics is what propels capitalism into recurrent crises. Just as in quantum systems, where excessive decohesion can collapse coherence into a phase transition, the global crises of our epoch—the 2008 financial collapse, widening inequality, climate breakdown, and political instability—may be interpreted as signals that capitalism is approaching such a threshold.
The implication is that humanity stands on the cusp of a potential revolutionary reorganization of political economy. This transformation would not be a return to Keynesianism, nor a continuation of neoliberalism, but the emergence of a new form of collective coherence capable of transcending the destructive contradictions of capital. Such a system would need to be ecological in its foundations, democratic in its governance, and oriented toward social reproduction rather than profit accumulation. In this sense, Quantum Dialectics reframes the current crisis as both danger and opportunity: danger in the sense that unchecked decohesion could lead to systemic collapse, but opportunity in the sense that contradictions may catalyze new modes of organization that embody higher levels of integration and coherence. The future of political economy, therefore, lies not in the perpetuation of capitalism’s oscillations but in the dialectical possibility of post-capitalist transformation.
Keynesianism, neoliberalism, and the Post-Keynesian critiques that followed should not be regarded as isolated intellectual schools or merely as competing economic doctrines. Rather, they must be understood as dialectical expressions of capitalism’s evolving contradictions, each arising in response to crises that exposed the inadequacies of preceding paradigms. Keynesianism stabilized capitalism in the aftermath of depression and war, neoliberalism sought to restore profitability amid the breakdown of Keynesian cohesion, and Post-Keynesianism emerged to critique both, pointing toward unresolved instabilities within the system. When interpreted through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, these shifts reveal a deeper pattern: the perpetual interplay of cohesion and decohesion, the quantization of contradictions into successive paradigms, and the eventual emergence of transformations that reshape the very ground of political economy.
Within this framework, Keynesianism appears as the paradigm of cohesion, one that sought to institutionalize stability through the synthesis of state intervention and market activity. Neoliberalism, by contrast, radicalized decohesion, dismantling stabilizing structures in the name of market freedom and unleashing new forms of volatility. Post-Keynesianism reopens the search for balance, insisting on the management of uncertainty, the regulation of finance, and the recognition of systemic fragility. Yet even as these critical insights enrich our understanding, they remain largely circumscribed within the parameters of capitalism itself. They address contradictions by seeking equilibrium within the system rather than by envisioning alternatives beyond it.
The crises of our epoch—ecological breakdown, widening global inequality, and disruptive technological transformations—signal that the contradictions of capitalism have reached a new level of intensity. These challenges cannot be resolved through incremental reform alone, whether Keynesian or Post-Keynesian. They demand a more profound dialectical sublation, one that does not merely oscillate between cohesion and decohesion within capitalism, but that transcends the very limits of capitalist political economy. As Quantum Dialectics suggests, just as excessive decohesion in a quantum system can collapse coherence into a transformative phase transition, so too the escalating crises of global capitalism may foreshadow the necessity of revolutionary reorganization.
What is required, therefore, is not simply a new economic policy framework, but the emergence of a new systemic coherence—ecological in its priorities, democratic in its governance, and oriented toward the collective reproduction of life rather than the accumulation of capital. The dialectical task before humanity is to transform crisis into opportunity, to sublate the contradictions of the present into a higher order of social organization. In this sense, Quantum Dialectics offers not only a reinterpretation of past paradigms but also a framework for imagining and constructing a post-capitalist future, one in which cohesion and decohesion are rebalanced in service of planetary survival and human emancipation.
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