Social Planning and Social Science: Historical Continuities and Comparative Discontinuities

The antecedents to the planning model have strangely contradictory histories within socialist and capitalist nations. Planning became the essential touchstone of the Soviet revolution. The ability to predict the future and organize the present to reach specific goals was viewed as a fundamental law of socialist society distinguishing it from capitalist society. Some critics refer to the Soviet Union as the epitome of an over-managed society (Etzioni, 1969:37).