Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt Read Free Book Online Page A

(marked symptomatically by the ascendancy of Calvin Coolidge in the United States and by comparably negligent types in much of western Europe), the utter devastation of the 1929 slump and the ensuing depression forced all governments to choose between ineffectual reticence and overt intervention. Sooner or later, all would opt for the latter.
    Whatever remained of the laissez-faire state was then erased by the experience of total war. With no exception, winners and losers in World War II committed not just the country, the economy and every citizen to the pursuit of war; they also mobilized the state for this purpose in ways which would have been inconceivable just thirty years earlier. Whatever their political colour, the combatant states mobilized, regulated, directed, planned and administered every aspect of life.
    Even in the United States, the job you held, the wage you were paid, the things you could buy and the places you might go were all constrained in ways that would have horrified Americans a few short years before. The New Deal, whose agencies and institutions had seemed so shockingly innovatory, could now be seen as a mere prelude to the business of mobilizing the whole country around a collective project.
    War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer. Without anyone quite intending it, western Europe and North America entered upon a new era.
    The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of ‘planning’. Rather than letting things just happen, economists and bureaucrats concluded, it was better to think them out in advance. Unsurprisingly, planning was most admired and advocated at the political extremes. On the Left it was thought that planning was what the Soviets did so well; on the Right it was (correctly) believed that Hitler, Mussolini and their fascist acolytes were committed to top-down planning and that this accounted for their appeal.
    The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data. But he accepted, at least in wartime, the necessity of short-term planning and controls. For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives. But for this to work, governments needed to know what they wished to achieve and this, in the eyes of its advocates, was what ‘planning’ was all about.
    Curiously, the enthusiasm for planning was especially marked in the United States. The Tennessee Valley Authority was nothing if not an exercise in confident economic design: not just of a vital resource but of the economy of a whole region. Observers like Louis Mumford declared themselves “entitled to a little collective strutting and crowing”: the TVA and similar projects showed that democracies could match the dictatorships when it came to large-scale, long-term, forward-looking schemes. A few years earlier, Rexford Tugwell had gone so far as to eulogize the idea: “I see the great plan already/And the keen joy of the work will be mine . . . /I shall roll up my sleeves—make/America over.” 6
    The difference between a planned economy and a state-owned economy was still unclear to many. Liberals like Keynes, William Beveridge or Jean Monnet, the founding spirit behind French planning, had no time for nationalization as an objective in its own right, though they were flexible as to its practical advantages in particular cases. The same was true of the Social Democrats of Scandinavia: far more interested in progressive taxation and the provision of all-embracing social services than in state control of major industries—car manufacturing, for example.
    Conversely,