Prediction and predicament Historicity, the state and socio-economic planning in the Netherlands, 1917–1999

Socio-economic planning was once thought of as a radical idea of supplanting the mechanism of the free market with central coordination. Nowadays the notion of “planning” in the Dutch political discourse rather denotes a technique of government that should guarantee the well-being of the economy (in terms of economic growth) and sound government finance. How did planning in the Netherlands went from a radical vision of the future to a technique of maintaining the present status quo? In this thesis, I argue that this question should be understood as a question of centralisation and decentralisation and as a question of how the future was conceptualised in Dutch politics. To this end, I investigate the Dutch planning discourse in the context of debates on the future, focussing in particular on the role of the Dutch Central Planning Bureau, the foremost economic advisors to the Dutch government. Planning, I would argue should be understood as a practice of mapping out political decision-making which binds the actions of the state to scientific expertise, on the one hand (technocracy), and political deliberation, on the other (democracy). In this manner, planning played a crucial role in orienting politics towards the future. Furthermore, I will argue that in the second half of the 20^th century a fundamental shift in the experience of time occurred, partly caused by an extension of the role of planning in modern government, which has diminished the faith in liberal democracy as a vehicle to realise structural change in society.