labor movement to progress and expand.^19 Planning wouldnot become
a public objective, except, as Charles Maier observes, “in a restricted
sense,” as a market-oriented managerial imperative to solve distri-
bution problems by increasing productivity.^20 Even Keynesian demand
management was interpreted in a minimalist fashion, without an
institutional commitment to achieve high levels of employment.
The left, it must be said, was not always clear about the exact
meaning of planning. In Britain, for instance, the Labour Party came
to power in 1945 with a commitment to nationalize and plan, but
little interest in Keynesian demand management.^21 Labour’s idea of
planning, however, remained vague and focused on short-term short-
ages, and it faced significant opposition from businesses, but also from
trade unions and from a public tired of wartime controls. Planning
soon gave way to a more limited commitment in favor of Keynesian
and welfare policies.^22 Similarly, the French left came out of the war
with a rather abstract idea of planning, and ended up focusing on
nationalizations and social programs.^23 Intriguingly, it was the refor-
mist right that salvaged the planning idea in France, to reconstruct it
in a liberal and modernist perspective, as a sort of “conspiracy in the
public interest between big business and big officialdom.”^24 French
planning, noted Peter Hall, “was designed to enhance the operation of
the market rather than supersede it.”^25 Likewise, in Japan “a conser-
vative network of technologically advanced industry, finance, and the
state bureaucracy [was] able to exploit the political exclusion of the
(^19) Mark Blyth,Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change
20 in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 79–86.
21 Maier,In Search of Stability, pp. 129–30.
Margaret Weir, “Ideas and Politics: The Acceptance of Keynesianism in Britain
and the United States,” in Peter A. Hall (ed.),The Political Power of Economic
Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 57,
22 67, and 80.
Ibid., pp. 74–75 and 80; Andrew Shonfield,Modern Capitalism: The Changing
Balance of Public and Private Power, London, Oxford University Press, 1965,
23 89–99.
Richard F. Kuisel,Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and
Economic Management in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press,
24 1981, pp. 175 and 201.
Shonfield,Modern Capitalism, p. 128; Kuisel,Capitalism and the State in
Modern France, pp. 248–52.
(^25) Peter A. Hall,Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in
Britain and France, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986, p. 166.
The age of universality (1945–1980) 113