Search

Book reviewed in this article: Mark Thatcher, The Politics of Telecommunications. National Institutions, Convergence and Change

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING WAS fashionable in the 1960s at a time when the French model had become extremely popular in Western Europe. However, analyses of planning experience were then generally inhibited by a preoccupation with descriptions of the formal planning procedures rather than with any serious attempt to assess anything but the economic consequences of planning. (Andrew Shonfield's classic study of Modern Capitalism was a conspicuous exception to this criticism.) Attention was focused on plans as official documents rather than upon a set of planning practices that might be only remotely related to any formal statement of public policy. Planning was viewed too much from the forecasting end rather than the implementation end and the rationality of objectives became more of a preoccupation than the practical problems of translating them into reality. A normative model of efficient decision-making was all too often assumed to be readily transposable because of a wholly unrealistic notion of the ways in which organizations work.

FRANCE IS A COUNTRY IN WHICH PAST POLITICAL BATTLES ARE IN the forefront of the minds of those who are engaged in contemporary conflicts. The March 1977 elections in the 36,383 communes of metropolitan France could evoke memories of 1877 and 1947. The thirtieth anniversary of the Gaullist landslide of 1947 was directly concerned with local elections as such, while 1877 recalled the defeat of President MacMahon's attempt to impose his choice of government a century ago, which finally settled the struggle between Left and Right over the regime of the Third Republic. Anticipation that the regime established by General de Gaulle would be put to the searching test of a clash between the President and a Left-wing Assembly majority converted in some people's minds the March 1977 local clections into a prologue to this decisive national confrontation.

The survival of a concept is generally only secured at the price of an intellectual odyssey in the course of which it is transformed out of all recognition. The nineteenth century fortunes of the idea of solidarity exemplify this axiom only too strictly. It became the victim of a multiplicity of ingenious puns and metaphors as well as outright malicious distortions that rendered a simple, technical word, drawn from the sphere of jurisprudence, at once emotive and obscure, influential and diffuse. As the eminent and caustic critic of the twentieth century, Julien Benda, formulated this vital problem of the fate of concepts, “pour l'historien des idées des hommes, la réalité ce n'est point ce qu'ont été les idées dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont inventées, mais ce qu'elles ont été dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont trahies… car il est clair qu'une doctrine se propage d'autant plus largement qu'elle est apte à satisfaire un plus grand nombre de sentiments divers.” This pessimistic view has been all too frequently verified in human history.