ABSTRACT
To many people, standing on the threshold of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, it may appear that public enterprise is on the verge of triumph. Even in the already-industrialised economies that prefer to deem themselves privately oriented, public enterprise generally accounts for some ten per cent or more of their gross national production; in the developing economies, including those amongst them that are favourable to private enterprise, this percentage is generally exceeded; and there are numerous economies, both relatively developed as well as developing, in which private enterprise, if not virtually eliminated, is manifestly the junior partner with a highly uncertain future. Persons lacking a sense of history may be content to attribute this expansion of the public sector to the Communist Manifesto of 1848, to Karl Marx, and the mistaken teachings of the universities; but people having a better knowledge of the past will be aware that state enterprise (for the term public enterprise had, perhaps, better be reserved for the time when governments are in some degree answerable to their populations) has a history stretching back over hundreds, indeed, thousands of years. 1 Because the influence of Adam Smith on the development of economics and of Herbert Morrison on the public corporation may initially have focussed disproportionate attention upon British ideas and practice, the fact that British experience with state enterprise was unrepresentative may, perhaps, not have been sufficiently remarked. Whilst, prior to the arrival of municipal gas and water undertakings in the course of the nineteenth century, Britain had little to show in the way of state (or public) enterprise, by the time of the Renaissance the continent of Europe had in many places seen mining and metallurgy dominated by state undertakings, the France of Louis XIV and Louis XV had seen its “Maisons Royales”, inspired successively by Colbert and Madame de Pompadour, producing amongst other more mundane articles the famed Gobelin tapestries, St. Gobain glass, and Sevres porcelain; and the Prussia of Prince Bismarck, characteristically, had seen the Prussian State Railways. 2 Nevertheless, if not the novelty often represented by unsympathetically disposed observers, public enterprise until the period between the first and second world wars was a distinctly minor phenomenon and only since the second world war, with the expansion of the Soviet bloc, the victory of Chinese communism, the breakup of the former colonial empires, and the many transfers, both deliberate and unintended, of enterprises from private to public hands, has public enterprise moved into its present position as a potentially equal partner with, and possible successor to, private enterprise.
