Economic Prophecies and Counter-Prophecies

Abstract

Economic calculation was yet another source of French ambivalence, that is to say the relationship between the country’s productive resources and the demands placed upon them by the German problem. This calculation already has figured in our analysis, however implicitly, for in many respects it is at the foundation of the ideological debate. The political left, which characteristically associated themselves with the ordinary citizen, saw fascism as the primary evil of their time. Its emphasis upon nationalism and social discipline was antithetical to the interests of workers who needed international peace as a condition for improving their lot at home. Indeed, French socialists and communists subscribed to the view that fascism was nothing more than a particularly ugly form of capitalism. The political right, which characteristically attracted spokesmen from the possessing classes, saw fascism differently. Most, it would be fair to say, did not see it as an appropriate answer to their concerns; but in the anti-left protestations of the regimes in Berlin and Rome, they did see a commendable resistance to what they regarded as the primary evil of their time: socialism-communism. As for the political centre, and once more characteristically, its practitioners were people of modest fortunes whose concerns about Marxist-inspired property expropriations were at least partially offset by alarm over fascist incursions into civil liberties.