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With reference to the writings of Keynes and Polanyi, this paper compares the attempt by the Western powers to restore the pre-1914 liberal economic order in the 1920s with the Anglo- American globalization project of the 1990s. Keynes and Polanyi understood that the subordination of economic livelihoods to the financial dictates of the international gold standard in the inter-war years would result in mass unemployment (Keynes) and the social and political destabilization of national economies (Polanyi). The Great Depression, German national socialism and other forms of European fascism, Soviet five-year Planning, the American New Deal and the lessons of the Second World War gave rise to a post war political and economic order which subordinated capital to political and social objectives. The abandonment of the Bretton Woods Financial Order in 1971-1973 created permissive conditions for capital to regain economic freedom from national controls. We conclude with a comparison of Polanyi’s four institutions, which sustained the 19th century liberal economic order with the institutional context of economic globalization on the eve of the 21st century. Global financialization has created Keynes’ nightmare of a casino economy of rentiers and speculators and Polanyi’s disutopia of « a self regulating market » now dominated by large transnational corporations and financial conglomerates. The world economy is financially unstable, socially inequitable as never before and ultimately politically unsustainable.