Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In post-war western and central Europe only Communists put their faith in Soviet-style Plans (about which they knew very little), and even they had no notion of how such Plans might be applied to their local circumstances. The Soviet obsession with numerical targets, production quotas and centralized direction was alien to all but a few of the contemporary western advocates of planning. The latter—and they came in many varieties—were drawing on a very different set of sources. The vogue for plans and planning began long before 1945. Throughout the inter-war depression, from Hungary to Great Britain, voices were raised in support of a planned economy of one kind or another. Some of the ideas propounded, notably in Austria and among the British Fabians, derived from an older Socialist tradition, but many more had their origins in pre-1914 liberal reformism. The nineteenth-century ‘caretaker’ state, its attention confined to security and policing, was outmoded, so the argument ran. If only on prudential grounds—to forestall political upheaval—it would now be necessary to intervene in economic affairs to regulate imbalances, eliminate inefficiencies and compensate for the inequities and injustice of the market.