Planned economy rhetoric was the 1930s mainstream in Britain, not a fringe

Evidence

The idea of a planned economy as the answer to the ‘chaos of laissez-faire’ circulated as early as 1929 on the fringes of all British political parties, while the Soviet Union implemented its first Five Year Plan in 1928. “Planning is forced upon us,” wrote one of its most vocal promoters in 1933, “not for idealistic reasons, but because the old mechanism which served us when markets were expanding naturally and spontaneously is no longer adequate when the tendency is in the opposite direction … The economic system is out of gear,” concluded Harold Macmillan, echoing the Zeitgeist of post-1929 England. Such was the pervasiveness of planning that it became defined as the “middle opinion” of the 1930s, paving the way for the post-World War II consensus on the British welfare state. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 65

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s map of austerity/neoliberalism history: the postwar welfare consensus is usually read as the baseline that 1970s neoliberalism broke from, but here planning is itself the constructed villain from the 1930s. — connects to: Economic planning was mainstream middle opinion in the 1930s, not a fringe radical idea. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 65; Pro-business elites endorsed planning and rejected laissez-faire in the 1930s — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 66; Interwar British free market economics faced contempt from mainstream figures — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 401
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly made planning’s ‘scientificity’ persuasive to British elites including industrialists, and which of these same people later funded the Mont Pelerin reaction?

Broader Connections

• Economic planning was mainstream middle opinion in the 1930s, not a fringe radical idea. #corroborates (1.00) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 65
• Interwar British free market economics faced contempt from mainstream figures #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 401
• Pro-business elites endorsed planning and rejected laissez-faire in the 1930s #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 66