The Car of Collectivism

Abstract

The expression “mixed economy” defined economic and social policy during a large part of the twentieth century. It was popular in Europe after World War II, where most states, from France to Italy and the United Kingdom, were keen on increasing intervention in its name. In the glory days of Soviet communism, many economists detected a “convergence” between this regime and the West. A textbook of the 1960s on economic systems was typical, while moderate, in discussing the convergence between Western economies and command-and-control economies of the Soviet type:

But if command is apt to give way to the market mechanism during the process of industrialization, the latter is also likely to yield everywhere more and more social control for the sake of ensuring stability, providing public services, and directing economic development in socially desired ways. In the past, these kinds of planning and steering were instituted too rigidly in the East and perhaps too loosely in the West; some future convergence on this plane is not at all unlikely.…

But now that we know better, and perceive that the economic forces never have been, never can be, and never should be, left to themselves, and are seeking deliberately to subdue individual action into harmony with collective purposes, the more clearly we can detect the evils which accompany the strength of spontaneous organisation, the more effectively we may hope to check them.… The play of individual desires produces many results that outrage the general conscience, and, as we can control the lightning so soon as we understand it, we may hope, as we come better to understand the economic forces, indefinitely to increase our control of them, till we can make the ever-present vigilance ofthe individual’s desire to accomplish his own purposes subject to the control ofpublic aims, and so harness individualism to the car of collectivism …

—Philip Wicksteed¹