MACMILLAN, Harold.

£375 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Middle Way. A study of the problem of economic and social progress in a free and democratic society. Presentation copy of a later edition, with the ink signature of the Labour politician Clifford Allen (1889-1939), Macmillan's collaborator in the cross-party Next Five Years group, on the front free endpaper. Macmillan's printed compliments slip is loosely inserted. The Middle Way is among the most influential works by any British prime minister, arguably the blueprint for Conservative Party politics until the rise of Margaret Thatcher. In his memoirs, Macmillan lauded Allen as "one of the most remarkable men whom I have known, and one of the most attractive" (Winds of Change, p. 335). Their Next Five Years group aimed to work out a British version of Roosevelt's New Deal, focussing on a progressive programme of central planning, and its centrist interpretation of planning is often seen as paving the way for the post-war consensus on the mixed economy. The Middle Way itself develops a conservative system of interventionist and welfarist economic policy which provided an alternative both to the radical solutions of fascism and communism and also to the laissez-faire policy of the past. Drawing on Keynesian theory, but outlining a more direct plan of action, the book was "much the most cogent work on the state and the economy published by any of those who became prime ministers in the twentieth century" (ODNB).

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