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. Its popularity owed to the apparent scientificity of its mechanism as well as to the promise of an engineered economy where control and reason would be restored at the hands of the state. The success of the experimental methods in the natural sciences provided a vivid case in point for reformers eager to rein in the growing complexity of the world economy, whereas the discipline of economics was seen to have failed to provide a coherent picture of the crisis or suitable remedies to cure it.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 65