Competing proposals for a national Plan, in which the state would intervene actively to support, discourage, facilitate and if necessary direct key economic sectors, circulated widely among young engineers, economists and civil servants in France and Germany. For most of the inter-war years, would-be planners and their supporters languished in frustration at the political margins. The older generation of politicians was deaf to their appeals: to many on the conservative Right and Center state intervention in the economy was still abhorrent, while on the socialist Left it was generally believed
...more
