Social Aspects of the Planning State

We are witnessing today in both Europe and America the breakdown of what may be called the nineteenth-century equilibrium, and at the same time the effort to work out a new equilibrium as a basis of life for the twentieth century. The New Deal is the American phase of this movement. We can understand it better if we view it with the search-light of the movements in other countries, and if we make clear to ourselves what is driving them, how they are being driven, and what problems are in their path.The key to recent social developments seems to me to lie in the resurgence of the middle classes. This is a development of the last decade or so, and is largely the result of the failure of the two other major social groups—the capitalists and the workers—to give Western society, especially Western European society, leadership and direction. On the one hand, the capitalistic groups, while concentrating industrial and financial resources, showed a sad incapacity to establish a leadership based on social needs and moral values.