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Retelling the Transformation of the International Economic Order from Within

This article aims to develop a historical sociology of international institutions inspired by a reading of Max Weber and his concept of the charisma of office. It traces the professional trajectory of a high-ranking international civil servant at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) erased from official historical records after being designated persona non grata—a “Keynesian” target to be shot down—in 1983, at the height of the Reagan-Thatcher era.

par Vincent GAYON

Gayon, Vincent. “Retelling the Transformation of the International Economic Order from Within: The Life and Death of Bureaucratic Charisma at the OECD (1955–1985).” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, vol. 5 no. 2, 2025, p. 334-378, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cap.2025.a963193.

Renowned both for the technicality and rationality of the debates that take place within them, economic bureaucracies—a fortiori international ones such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the World Bank—appear to leave little room for charismatic-type legitimacy as typified by Max Weber. By distinguishing it from rational-legal legitimacy, and by associating bureaucratization with the impersonalization of social relations, Weber seems to have led some of his readers to overlook the nonstandard bureaucrats. These people in positions of power, to whom extraordinary or exemplary attributes are ascribed, Weber refers to oxymoronically as having a “charisma of office” or a “bureaucratic charisma.”1 Such a bureaucratic charisma might be especially important in international organizations (that didn’t exist in Weber’s time), where the nature of the relationship to state power or even policy making was ever mediated inherently by constantly negotiated administrative rules and rights. The key point of charisma theory here is that charisma of office is therefore impersonal—not related to the [End Page 334] intrinsic qualities or prowess of an individual but to the social recognition (direct or indirect) of a bureaucrat—and nondecisional—in the sense that he or she does not necessarily have to act per se to be recognized as acting.

This article follows the career path of such a bureaucrat—Stephen (Steve) Marris—whose charisma was and still is regularly referred to by those who worked alongside him at the OECD. Nevertheless, he has been erased from official historical accounts since he became persona non grata there in 1983. His erasure from the OECD’s history came about because he was supposedly a devout “Keynesian” at the height of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Marris had been trained as an economist and joined the organization in the late 1950s. In the 1970s he was appointed as a special adviser to the secretary-general, who moved him up to the rank of departmental director (the highest in the organization) while relieving him of administrative management or, to put it in Weber’s words, enabling him to work “completely outside every-day organization.”2 As the OECD’s “organic intellectual” or “grey eminence,” he was charged with overseeing all of its work, that is, to transgress the sectoral departmental boundaries that usually structured it; he occupied an atypical position not seen before or since. The research challenge is to understand, over a period of thirty years, the evolving trans-governmental networks that progressively made this extraordinary bureaucratic position possible. More specifically, I focus on the transgovernmental networks on monetary and financial issues that were concentrated within the understudied OECD’s Working Party 3 (WP3), which developed a form of multilateral Keynesianism before turning neoliberal.

Using the notion of charisma of office does not make Stephen Marris either a demiurge or a prophet of international cooperation.3 Rather it helps us see how economic diplomacy is a different creature, one that weighs its words, and where every move and initiative is carefully considered. This charisma therefore does not resemble that of a political leader, a religious prophet, or a “total intellectual”4; nor is it a charisma of pulpit,5 all characterized by spectacular or oracular speech acts. What we see throughout his career is Marris’s unique ability to comprehensively oversee and integrate different OECD sectors intellectually, backed by lasting high-level and [End Page 335] international political support from the main delegations (especially those of the United States and West Germany) and the secretary-general. He was also able to forge strong links with the academic field, and he gained access to the organization’s most confidential and selective OECD arenas, such as the WP3 of the Economic Policy Committee (EPC). The EPC sought to establish a “multilateralism of payments” in the spirit of the Bretton Woods agreements and to domesticate international financial markets, as will be explained below.

By uncovering Marris’s trajectory, this paper sets out to describe the practical and contentious content of postwar economic multilateralism, especially the transition from roughly Keynesian to neoliberal economic orthodoxies. This approach mirrors in ways contemporary financial history, inspired by microhistory.6 By tracking the unique career of a single figure—including both his success and eventual exile—it becomes possible to see something different about the nature of multilateral economic policy making in the same period. In particular it allows us to understand the nature of the OECD secretariat and its role in linking the high-level monetary and financial bureaucracies of the member states, various academic fields, and other international secretariats. As Weber said: “The only decisive point for us is whether [charisma] has been considered charisma and has produced this effect, i.e., has found recognition.”7 The recognition of government delegations “that count” is akin to a “configuration of indirect charisma” or “situational charisma,” producing recognition effects internally, within the OECD, without this goal necessarily being sought by the delegates.8 As we shall see, Marris was above all an analyst but also a subject of this transformation in international economic cooperation. As such, his biography offers a priori a very narrow and embodied scale of observation to better understand what the abstract notion of “international economic cooperation” is made of socially. It also avoids the pitfall of state-centered classical diplomatic history, which recounts the exploits or failures of the protagonists of international relations based on major dates—treaty signings, summit meetings with heads of state—governments and diplomats, and secretaries general, without taking into account the constraints and technocratic personnel that shape their day-to-day action.

Recent work in international political economy and international political sociology has also recently recognized that the background of individual [End Page 336] actors matters even in large, international organizations. This perspective does not, therefore, conceive of international bureaucracies a priori as cohesive entities that can be reduced to their secretaries-general or to a homogeneous professional “culture.”9 But it emphasizes the internal battles between departments, which are fought over ideas as much as bureaucratic portfolios. It integrates the capacity of the committees, working groups, and experts of international organizations to develop public policies,10 without detaching them from the presence (actual or anticipated) of government delegates.11 The concept of charisma of office therefore brings an added advantage to the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change by focusing on the selection and trajectory of members, the consolidation of their positions, and their decline or even disappearance. It clarifies the mechanisms of bureaucratic and political domination within these spaces. It also allows us to shift the focus away from the usual suspects in international politics, and to rethink and retell standard historical narrative arcs, in particular regarding the social, intellectual, and economic turmoil of the late 1960s, the 1970s, and the neoliberal turn. However, rather than applying the convenient labels of “Keynesian” or “neoliberal consensus” to the period as fixed, static, and successive wholes, my analysis of the trajectory of Marris and his direct or indirect supporters attempts to capture the novelty, uncertainty, asperities, and conflicts that ran through “international economic cooperation” for his contemporaries.

From an OECD Insider’s Vantage Point: A Way to Retell and Decenter the Transformation of the International Economic Order

Marris’s policy trajectory falls within what the international political economy literature has designated as “embedded liberalism” or “Keynesian consensus” and its replacement by the “neoliberal era” or the “Washington consensus.” The first can be defined “as a normative framework committed to a form of institutionalized liberal multilateralism that is compatible with [End Page 337] various forms of active public management of the economy,” both national and international.12 Partly consecrated in the Bretton Woods agreements in 1944, it can be characterized by the re-embedding of the market society into the greater political structure through limitations in the movement of international capital flows, aimed at protecting new national planning measures (industrial policy, social systems); by curbing the power wielded by the financiers (blamed for the 1929 crisis); and by authorizing policies of active demand-side management to reach, through multilateral negotiation, full employment and economic growth.

Marris’s life, however, allows us to retell and decenter the story of the international economic order and its neoliberal transformation.13 It gives due weight to the perceived expectation and support, partly presented in Marris’s farewell seminar, cross-checked by other sources, and reinscribed in a wider relational space (see box).14

What is more, Marris’s trajectory falls obviously within the transformation of the OECD itself. In the literature devoted to the transformation of the international economic order, the IMF and the World Bank have largely been the focus of attention, leaving the OECD in a marginal position. Nevertheless, recent studies have clearly reassessed its multiple roles since the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in 1948 with the Marshall Plan in the context of postwar reconstruction, the intensification of the Cold War, and diverging conceptions of Western European integration. As put earlier by Alan Milward, the United States initiated the OEEC “as the first stage in the political and economic integration of Western Europe, the embryonic hope for a Western European government.”15 However, the OEEC did not become the executive of European integration or of the United States of Europe. The OEEC, with [End Page 338]

Precautions to Take in Interpreting Marris’s Farewell Seminar: The Trap of the Charisma of the Document

This research is based on interviews and the analysis of archives, including a rare document that serves as a unifying thread: the long, verbatim record of the unpublished seminar that Stephen Marris gave behind closed doors at the Château de la Muette, the Paris headquarters of the OECD, on June 24 and 30, 1983, in the form of a bureaucratic testament. This insider’s statement gives a unique insight into diplomatic-economic practices and the situated perception of its social supports and economic future. The speech is at once an eyewitness account, an analytical document, and a Keynesian positioning in the ongoing struggles—and is in itself a charismatic institutional event. Marris sums up his 27 years at the OECD and endeavors to defend the organization against what he describes as the “neo-classical monetarist consensus” (30). Intended for a limited audience, which he believed to be divided by recruitments and realignments at the time, his (self-)critical presentation was subject, in terms of the information delivered, to the cross-cutting constraints of his peers. At the same time, it was relatively free of the political constraints usually linked to governmental presence—ministers, delegates, and ambassadors were not invited—and from any future relationships within the institution, which he was leaving for the Institute for International Economics (IIE) in Washington, DC.

I have compared the material he presented with other sources (such as interviews and archives) to check for potential hagiographic bias and a posteriori rationalization (which Marris tried to avoid by divulging his own misjudgments.) The farewell seminar has since been clarified, nuanced, and occasionally criticized. The main blind spots in his account were in international trade and social, technological, and environmental issues. They testified to the internal competition of other bureaucratic entrepreneurs and, above all, the depreciation of these sectors in relation to monetary and financial issues deemed to be more structuring, which drew his attention as a Keynesian macroeconomist who played to his own strengths.

its intergovernmental structure, labored to propose a coordinated recovery plan and an agreement on the distribution of US aid and to standardize international economic statistics. It became an important site for coordinating growth policies and for transatlantic norms production and governance, in particular through the European Productivity Agency. Under US pressure, the OEEC continuously liberalized intra-European trade from 1949 onward. Until its replacement by the European Monetary Agreement in 1958, the European Payments Union (EPU), created in September 1950 as the first European clearing house backed by the United States, helped to rebuild currency convertibility and thus alleviated dollar shortages by boosting intra-European trade.16

The need for closer Atlantic cooperation to counter the Soviet economic offensive in developing countries and to cope with the emergence of the Global South at the United Nations, where the rich countries lost their majority, pushed the refoundation in 1961 of the OEEC as the OECD, with the United States and Canada as full members. The different names discussed at the time, such as “Organization for Atlantic Economic Cooperation” or “Atlantic Economic Organization” revealed the uncertainty of the future of the organization and the closed link to US geostrategic agenda. At its first ministerial meeting in 1961, the OECD passed an ambitious growth target for the 1960s—to increase the combined gross national product (GNP) of its member countries by 50 percent. As put by Mathieu Leimgruber and Matthias Schmelzer:

“The consensus centered on the notion of ‘collective demand management for the world economy’ and the resulting difficult negotiations about the respective responsibility of creditor and donor countries for the region’s balance of payments problems were held largely within the restricted Working Party 3 (WP3) of the EPC, the OECD’s ‘inner sanctum.’ Next to the management of overall demand and within this broadly Keynesian framework, the OECD also focused on policies aimed specifically at increasing longer-term growth, mainly in the framework of the human capital revolution.”17

However, as Leimgruber and Schmelzer acknowledge, and despite recent research by specialist historians on other institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS),18 we still lack a full account of the history of WP3, the successor of the EPU. The historiographical situation of the WP3 is very similar to that of the EPU, one of whose few monographs noted 35 years ago that: “It was probably the only multilateral institution [End Page 340] created after World War II whose claim to unmitigated success has gone unchallenged. Yet, despite its singular and successful record, it is almost unknown today. […] Not many contemporary experts in these fields can give a reasonably accurate explanation of what it was or what it did let alone how it operated.”19 Situated at this unprecedented transgovernmental crossroads, Marris’s position provides a good opportunity to better understand the transformations of the postwar international monetary order in arenas that are little known and beyond the reach of democratic debate due to the technical nature and confidentiality of their discussions. The advent of neoliberalism was played out in specific intergovernmental arenas, where Keynesian adaptation strategies were first implemented and discussed, particularly on monetary issues.20 Marris’s rise to prominence and his charismatic aura also helped reshape economic cooperation within the Keynesian transgovernmental network promoted, not without some reluctance and well-understood interests, by the US and West German delegations in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, as we shall see, those of the Thatcher-Kohl-Reagan triumvirate fought bitterly against this network—and erased the person who embodied it at the OECD.

Bibliographie:

1. In German: “Amtcharisma”; Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. See also Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building; Weber, La domination; Weber, “Transformation du charisme”. See also Bernadou et al., Que faire du charisme? and Deluermoz, Granger, Mazurel, and Vidal-Naquet, eds., special issue “Anatomie du charisme.”

2. Weber, On Charisma, 57.

3. Many others should be analyzed from the same standpoint, including, solely on the international arena, Keynes and White but also Per Jacobbson, Tomaso Padoa-Schioppa, Robert Triffin, Richard Stone, etc.

4. Bourdieu, “Total Intellectual.”

5. As Max Weber denounced in his lecture “Science as Vocation.”

6. Feiertag, Wilfrid Baumgartner.

7. Weber, “Drei reinen Typen,” 483; quoted in Kalinowski, “Max Weber.”

8. Dobry, Sociologie des crises, 242–56; Dobry, “Hitler, Charisma.”

9. Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World.

10. Chwieroth, Capital Ideas; Broome and Seabrooke, “Seeing Like an International Organisation”; Trondal et al., Unpacking International Organisations.

11. This trend of research is particularly developed in French academics, at the crossroads of sociology, history, and political science, and it emphasizes the processes of institutionalization, incarnation, and incorporation of institutions. See esp. Bourdieu, “Le mort saisit le vif”; Lagroye, “L’institution en pratiques.” On the development of international political sociology in this direction, see in particular Dezalay and Garth, Internationalization of Palace Wars; Bigo, “Pierre Bourdieu”; Siméant, Guide de l’enquête globale; and Gayon, “What Is the ‘International Economic Order.'”

12. Helleiner, “Life and Times,” 1117. “Embedded liberalism” is characterized by its openness to a relative diversity of political and economic regimes, like Soviet-style central planning, Japanese growth planning, French “planification,” etc. From this point of view, it cannot be strictly summed up as a form of Keynesianism. See also Steffek, Embedded Liberalism.

13. Biltoft, “Sundry Worlds.” For portraits of Stephen Marris, please see Gayon, “Souvenirs d’un apparatchik,” 62.

14. Stephen Marris, My History of My Time at the OECD: Record of Two Seminars given to the OECD Secretariat on 24th and 30th June 1983, OECD, Paris, 1983. In the private archives of Stephen Marris; a copy was also found in the OECD archives (Paris). This work is referred to as the “farewell seminar” in the text; all further references to this document will be followed by page numbers in parentheses.

15. Milward, Reconstruction, 207; quoted in Leimgruber and Schmelzer, “From the Marshall Plan,” 30.

16. Faudot, “European Payments Union.”

17. Leimgruber and Schmelzer, “From the Marshall Plan,” 34.

18. Yago, “Crisis Manager.”

19. Kaplan and Schleiminger, European Payments Union, 1.

20. See also Major, Architects of Austerity; Helleiner, States; Jabko, Playing the Market. For an overview of the monetary, political, and academic debates caricatured by the Keynesian/monetarist divide, see Théret, “Du keynésianisme.”


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Vincent Gayon (26 juin 2025). Retelling the Transformation of the International Economic Order from Within. Sociologie politique de l'économie. Consulté le 8 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/147x7


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