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During the Second World War, prominent economists in Britain and the USA contributed to formulating successful price control schemes. A great deal of theoretical elaboration accompanied this activity. This wartime experience held two lessons in particular for later generations of economists and policy-makers. Firstly, resources could be allocated efficiently and equitably, regulating markets without abolishing them. Secondly, the success of such regulation depended on mutual accord between workers, producers and governments and, at a higher level, on international cooperation.After the war attention turned to easing reconversion of the economy and permanently locking in some of the positive outcomes of wartime regulation in terms of price stability, full employment and social justice, debate consequently arising over the pros and cons of extending price controls to peacetime. In this context, the majority of economists and policy-makers became convinced that aggregate demand management was sufficient to achieve these goals simultaneously, while price and wage controls were either unnecessary, unless in very specific cases, or downright harmful. A minority of economists, however, represented notably by J.K. Galbraith, espoused a different approach and stressed the role of price and wage controls in reducing the risks of wage-price spirals in a context characterized by powerful trade unions and oligopolistic firms.The aim of this paper is to reconstruct this debate, focusing on the theoretical arguments underlying attempts to achieve price stability through wage controls. Interest in this approach, long ignored by economists and policymakers after the incomes policies of the 1970s, is re-emerging today in connection with the failure of monetary policy to fight deflation.