The interest in planning predated the war, and it had many sources,
some on the right, others on the left. Because planning supposed state
intervention in the market, and because communist regimes governed
their economy with five-year plans, the idea has in general been asso-
ciated with the left. As Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal noted,
however, before the twentieth century there was little reference to this
notion in the socialist tradition. Karl Marx, for one, had no use for
the idea.^11 Planning only came of age with the new century, first in
business and then in war.
In business, planning was introduced between the 1900s and the
1920s with Frederick W. Taylor’s idea of scientific management. For
Taylor, applied science and engineering could raise industrial pro-
ductivity significantlyand,indoingso,contributetosolvesocialconflicts
over distribution. “What we need,” explained one of his followers,
“is not more laws, but more facts, and the whole question will solve
itself.”^12 In the United States, in particular, private corporations
seemed large enough to implement by themselves and voluntarily
this sort of “social efficiency.” With its assembly line and mass pro-
duction of a modest car for the average consumer, the Ford Motor
Company pushed the logic a few steps further, and offered a fas-
cinating model to European reformers of the left and of the right,
captivated by what they called Fordism and Americanism. Mean-
while, during the First World War, German engineers and heads of
industry, Walther Rathenau and Wichard von Moellendorf, success-
fully organized their country’s production and distribution to sustain
the war effort, thus broadening the scope of scientific management
and planning to an entire society.
In revolutionary Russia, Lenin and his economic advisors took
notice. The Soviet Union would emulate the Taylor system “and adapt
it to our purposes.”^13 In Europe, planning also appealed to the left,
because its reliance on the power of the state seemed to push back
(^11) Gunnar Myrdal,Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning and Its
12 International Implications, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1960, pp. 4–8.
Henry L. Gantt, quoted in Charles S. Maier,In Search of Stability:
Explorations in Historical Political Economy, Cambridge University Press,
1987, p. 25.
(^13) V. I. Lenin, quoted in James C. Scott,Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes
to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1998, p. 101.
The age of universality (1945–1980) 111