We are slowly adding more pamphlets. Historical note number 22 is Monty and the Myth of The Unshakeable Plan: How Britain Won the War but Lost the Peace.

War, the ultimate collective crisis, shapes ideas with unique intensity. A society fights for its life, and the peacetime culture that emerges from the ordeal must operate within the philosophical framework that emerges from the fight. Peace is suffused with the “aftermyth” of war.

In World War 2, improvisation worked well for the Germans but planning, personified by General Sir Bernard Montgomery, worked well for the British. After the war, the British remembered this, percieved that planning was important for success, and duly discovered that planning an economy does not work.

Because of the way we fought the war, or thought that we had fought it, we installed in our minds a model of success which did work militarily, after a fashion, but which could not work economically, and which in due course did not work.