ABSTRACT
A quarter of a century ago Ralph Dahrendorf drew a distinction between two types of rationality that had begun to infuse industrial society. ‘Market rationality’, he suggested, was based on the assumption that ‘a smoothly functioning market is in fact to the greatest advantage of the greatest number’. As regards the state, it resulted in a ‘politically passive…hands-off attitude in matters of legislation and decision-making’. ‘Plan rationality’, in contrast, ‘has as its dominant feature precisely the setting of substantive social norms. Planners determine in advance who does what and who gets what’ (Dahrendorf 1968:219). While it is clear that Dahrendorf treated market and plan rationality as ideal-type constructs, it is also clear that he regarded the capitalist political economies of North America and Western Europe as the closest empirical approximations to the former, and state socialist political economies, to the latter.
