State Planning and Private Entrepreneurship in the 20th century
This workshop will be held in-person. It aims to bring together leading scholars across geographies to think about the role of government planning in the 20th century. It will include four panels of mostly advanced PhD candidates and early career scholars. from History or adjacent fields, as well as a policy-oriented roundtable discussion featuring established scholars.
Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a CV (max 2 pages) should be submitted to Friedrich Asschenfeldt (fjga@princeton.edu) and Adhitya Dhanapal (dhanapal@princeton.edu) by Aug 1, 2023. Decisions will be sent out by the end of Aug 2023. Participants are requested to submit their papers of approximately 6000 words (excluding footnotes) by 9th October 2023.
Across the globe, the twentieth century saw widespread enchantment with the power of the state to reshape all aspects of economic life. In the era of total war, no part of the economy, from production to trade and consumption, was exempt from state intervention. The infatuation with “planning”, broadly understood, had intellectual priors in the socialist movement and military planning. Perhaps the most radical expression of planning was attempted in Bolshevik Russia, but in the aftermath of the Great Depression many governments, liberal and illiberal alike, propounded new visions of social progress through state-led investment programs. In the wake of the 1973 Oil Shock, disillusionment with state planning spread across the world, resulting in the dismantling of planning bureaucracies in subsequent decades.
While the critique of planning in response to the rise of state involvement in the economy has focused on the sweeping power of the state and its consequences for political order, the mechanisms of planning remain comparatively underexplored. The workshop proposes to investigate the legal, fiscal, and procedural instruments that were pursued to achieve the promulgated goals of planning, examining the dynamic relationship between state planning and private entrepreneurship within a comparative global context. Rather than treating the state and the market as separate entities where the former intervenes in the latter, this workshop seeks to unpack the ways in which the state and entrepreneurs co-operated, competed, and came into conflict with one another in the reorganization of economic life. A global comparative approach will allow us to bring actors from different geographies and periods into dialogue with one another. In doing so, the workshop seeks to transcend the neat compartments of the “history of capitalism”, “history of communism” and “history of socialism”.
The workshop invites contributions to the following questions: