Planning in Modern Britain

Human beings have always planned, but the meaning, methods, and purpose of planning have changed over time and with circumstance. Planning has been politicized ever more widely as the individual’s ‘personal’ planning has succumbed before, or been reinforced by, planning by the state at its local, national, and international levels. Secularization entails the utopia’s transfer from heaven to earth, and in this process nineteenth-century Chartist populism, liberal moralism, and conservative paternalism all played their part. In the twentieth century, both Labour and Conservative parties merged all three into a statist and interventionist programme accelerated by the interwar depression and by the post-war need to validate democracy in the face of the Soviet pretensions. The essay concludes by discussing the contrasting approaches to planning required in four areas of twentieth-century government: education, welfare, the economy, and the environment.

The Outlaw

The first chapter focuses on Schmitt’s post-war diaries (Glossarium) and a number of small essays written between 1946 and 1949. In these works Schmitt seeks to come to terms with the defeat of the Third Reich, his own fate as a well-known collaborator, and the situation of the German people. The reading underscores Schmitt’s resistance to the admission of guilt and analyses his strategies to present himself as the victim of liberal moralism. At the centre of the inquiry stands Schmitt’s complex and conflicted self-definition in religious, political and professional terms.