World Wars of the Twentieth Century 345ment, and from the armed services came together to make this possi
ble; but the principles of management—an unobstructed flow-through
of appropriately assorted factors of destruction—were the same as
those which had been evolved since the 1880s by big business firms
for managing the production and distribution of goods for private
consumption. Perhaps one may argue that in private businesses costs
measured in money mattered so much that planning of material flows
was always firmly subordinated to financial calculation, whereas during
the war, material factors of production and destruction mattered more
than money costs to most of the persons concerned with national
planning and management. But financial controls were utilized in each
belligerent country too, both at a national, governmental level and
within private firms and corporations.
Interplay between financial calculation of costs and quantitative cal
culation of manpower, food, fuel, transport, and raw materials are
always complicated, whether in peace or in war. During World War I
only when one of the two got out of control did disaster strike. Rus
sia’s inflation and consequent economic dislocation in 1917 and Ger
many’s physical shortages of food and manpower in 1918 brought
each to defeat, registering in only slightly divergent ways the limits of
deliberate national management within the two countries. Successful
maintenance of the war effort required both material and financial
plans to work together with reasonable accuracy to the facts. The
managers of the major belligerents achieved this during World War I
with a degree of success no one had dreamed possible beforehand. In
view of the global propagation of managed economies in the second
half of the twentieth century, this is likely to seem the major historical
significance of World War I in time to come.
Interwar Reaction and Return to Managed Economies
during World War IIAmong contemporaries and survivors such a judgment would have
seemed absurd. As soon as fighting ended, the emergency bureaucra
cies administering the war effort were disbanded (even in the Soviet
Union), and most of the legal constraints that had been imposed on
private behavior during the war were canceled. To be sure, revolution
and fear of revolution dominated central and eastern Europe until
about 1923. Even in the United States, return to normalcy, though an
effective political slogan, was never seriously attempted. New pos
sibilities of mass production and urban living, glimpsed during the