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since) with socialism. This, in turn, reminds us just how very desperate circumstances were. Intelligent conservatives—like the many Christian Democrats who found themselves in office after 1945 for the first time—offered little objection to state control of the “commanding heights” of the economy; along with steeply progressive taxation, they welcomed it enthusiastically.
    There was a moralized quality to policy debates in those early postwar years. Unemployment (the biggest issue in the UK, the US or Belgium); inflation (the greatest fear in central Europe, where it had ravaged private savings for decades); and agricultural prices so low (in Italy and France) that peasants were driven off the land and into extremist parties out of despair: these were not just economic issues, they were regarded by everyone from priests to secular intellectuals as tests of the ethical coherence of the community.
    The consensus was unusually broad. From the New Dealers to West German “social market” theorists, from Britain’s governing Labour Party to the “indicative” economic planning that shaped public policy in France (and Czechoslovakia, until the 1948 Communist coup): everyone believed in the state. In part, this was because almost everyone feared the implications of a return to the terrors of the recent past and was happy to constrain the freedom of the market in the name of the public interest. Just as the world was now to be regulated and protected by a bevy of international institutions and agreements, from the United Nations to the World Bank, so a well-run democracy would likewise maintain consensus around comparable domestic arrangements.
    As early as 1940, Evan Durbin (a British Labour pamphleteer) had written that he could not imagine “the least alteration” in the contemporary trend towards collective bargaining, economic planning, progressive taxation and the provision of publicly funded social services. Sixteen years later, the English Labour politician Anthony Crosland could write, with still greater confidence, that there had been a permanent transition from “an uncompromising faith in individualism and self-help to a belief in group action and participation”. He could even assert that “[a]s for the dogma of the ‘invisible hand’ and the belief that private gain must always lead to the public good, these failed entirely to survive the Great Depression; and even Conservatives and businessmen now subscribe to the doctrine of collective government responsible for the state of the economy”. 5
    Durbin and Crosland were both social democrats and thus interested parties. But they were not wrong. By the mid-’50s English politics had reached such a level of implied consensus around public policy issues that mainstream political argument was dubbed “Butskellism”: blending the ideas of R.A. Butler, a moderate Conservative minister and Hugh Gaitskell, the centrist leader of the Labour opposition in those years. And Butskellism was universal. Whatever their other differences, French Gaullists, Christian Democrats and Socialists shared a common faith in the activist state, economic planning and large-scale public investment. Much the same was true of the consensus that dominated policy-making in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, Austria and even ideologically-riven Italy.
    In Germany, where social democrats persisted in their Marxist rhetoric (if not Marxist policies) until 1959, there was nevertheless comparatively little separating them from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats. Indeed, it was the (to them) stifling consensus on everything from education to foreign policy to the public provision of recreational facilities—and the interpretation of their country’s troubled past—that drove a younger generation of German radicals into “extra-parliamentary” activity.
    Even in the United States, where Republicans were in power throughout the ’50s and aging New Dealers found