Wall Street crash and the Great Depression of the ‘30s raised serious doubts on the goodness of market capitalism and the effectiveness of liberal recipes. In Great Britain J.M.Keynes developed his General Theory, which underlined the shortcomings of neoclassical analysis and the limits of laissez faire and proposed State intervention as the only possible way to overcome the crisis. In the meantime, the economic central planning implemented by Stalin from 1927, after the brief experience of the New Economic Policy and a form of market socialism, proposed itself as an alternative to capitalism which was showing its limits and troubles.

In most Western countries a vivid debate developed over a possible alternative between the rising socialist experience in Soviet Union and liberal capitalism: if the awareness of the need to find a “third way” between the two was largely shared, the suggestions on what shape should take this alternative were highly different and often conflicting. Main issues of discrepancy were the role to be given to State and the scope to be left to market.

In France, far more than in other countries, the debate on the third way was particularly intense and, especially from 1932 when the effects of the economic crisis started to be felt in the country, the efforts to practically develop an alternative to liberal capitalism and socialism involved two main different solutions: planning and corporatism. Some form of planning – according to different versions – was especially suggested by neo-liberals and socialist unionists; whereas corporatism – in its possible variants – was supported by catholic conservatives, anti-communist unionists, academics, royalists and employers (Kuisel 1981: 98-104). Although corporatism had much less influence and support than planning in the interwar period, it became one of the pillars of the Vichy regime during the war.

Corporatism and planning perspectives often overlapped (see Pirou 1933) and both were since the beginning imbued with some elements of neo-liberalism: such a combination of corporatism-planning-neoliberalism is the backbone of the French design developed for the European construction soon after WWII. Such a design, as originally conceived never succeeded and it was instead replaced by an ordoliberal architecture.