The Heart of the Atlantic Constitution: International Economic Stability, 1919-1998

enough to be relevant in the more rarified, infinite dimensional context of beliefs and very general social choice rules. In the world, however, beliefs need not be convex. An individual may hold two conflicting views, assigning to each differing probabilities of truth, or indeed, as Keynes noted, may be completely uncertain. Because of the failure of convexity, the heart can fail continuity at certain configurations of beliefs. By analogy with dynamic systems, the failure of continuity is called a catastrophe. A cascade is precisely the catastrophic change from one heart configuration to a completely different one. This very simple notion of a catastrophic cascade is adapted from Zeeman’s earlier ideas. However, the extension of the idea that I have proposed is made in the attempt to include more general transformations than those considered by Zeeman. The abstract object that I call a heart may not, in fact, be an equilibrium, if by this we mean that it is associated with unchanging beliefs and constant behavior on the part of the members of the society. However, the heart is defined by certain boundaries in the domains of beliefs and actions. An important feature of the heart is that when the equilibrium or core is, in fact, nonempty, then the heart and core coincide. On the other hand, when the core is empty, then behavioral cycles are certainly possible inside the heart. In normal circumstances, such cycles need not prove destructive to fundamental belief coherence in the Constitution. By analogy with the notion of an economic core, I use the term core belief to refer to the set of collective beliefs that are mutually compatible within the community. Under the circumstance of a catastrophe, the core belief can become empty. The heart of the Constitution is the exceedingly complex pattern of beliefs and actions, all of which are individually rational with respect to empirical reality and tenable according to the philosophical attitudes of the members of the community. It is defined by certain barriers, or boundaries, to belief, cognition, and behavior. What I have termed the chaos hypothesis (my interpretation of Keynes’s key insight), I see as a device by Keynes to overcome a belief barrier that prevented an understanding of the Depression. Keynes’s insight made accessible a number of different possible hearts, one of which eventually came into focus in the period after World War II. The earlier discussion of the implementation of hegemonic internationalism was intended to show how this depended on core beliefs about the nature of the international system and of the necessity of Soviet containment held by