Tuesday in our field ii

The fascists were able to have their way in early experiments with the welfare state because they were unencumbered by the Marxist disagreements about reform versus revolution, unconcerned by orthodoxies of any kind. And so they were free to say: perhaps we should plan, the Soviets do it, it seems to work; or, perhaps we should steal from the Jews and redistribute, that seems practical.

To do them justice, there was also a more sophis-
ticated consideration: why don't we instrumen-
talize the state to plan and impose economic policies, rather than go through the tedious mech-
anisms of parliamentary politics. In the fu-
ture, let us simply pronounce the policy, rather than seek support for it.


































Tony Judt
Timothy Snyder
Thinking the Twentieth Century
Penguin, 2012©