Page:Neurath O. (1942) International Planning for Freedom.pdf/5

426 of cattle, vegetables, coffee, milk, oil, etc., and how to make possible the erection of settlements, hospitals and schools, when workmen, wood and clay waited to be used.

When these pains and sorrows increased, more and more social engineers made our profit system with its competition responsible for them. But just the most comprehensive critics, e.g., Marx and Engels, concentrated on a detailed analysis of capitalist society, the decline of which they predicted together with the arrival of a society of the people based on planning; but they avoided a comprehensive analysis of such a future and opposed their 'scientific socialism' to what they called 'unscientific utopianism', treating the analysis of the patterns of imagined societies of the future like the making of projects (Cabet and others); thus they blocked the path to a broader development of social engineering.

Other groups of social scientists were no longer inclined to make such comparative studies of possible social orders by creating a kind of 'scientific utopianism'; Pareto, e.g., regarded the recurrence of 'economic crises' as nothing but a "particular case of the great law of rhythm that prevails in all social phenomena." Only a few authors of the 19th century, such as Popper-Lynkeus, dealt seriously with the problems of a 'planned economy', but even they did not analyze the whole field of happiness, and restricted themselves to the analysis of the planning of certain principal elements of our production. The Russians, whose leaders had based their political actions on a critical analysis of capitalist society with its wars and rebellions, started their building of a new society without any comprehensive theory of planning. Therefore we have to build up this part of social engineering in a period in which many groups of people want to make immediate decisions in matters of planning.

Such decisions are based in the end on common-sense arguments, since we cannot find index numbers of 'happiness conditions' for scientific comparison. But the decisions are different when made without comprehensive knowledge, or when made after hearing all the experts. 'Brain trusts' of first-class scientists will therefore play an essential, nay fundamental, role by bringing forth whole teams of possible well-analyzed patterns from which, finally, one will be selected by the nation or by regional groups after much discussion and many changes.

In what is called the 'technocratic' movement and in similar movements there often exists a tendency, as it were, scientifically to find the one best