statism

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Statism (or etatism) is a term that may refer to either one or both of the following:

• A major state, including government policy, role in the direction of the economy, both directly through state-owned enterprises or other machinery of government and indirectly through the state-directed economic planning of the overall economy.^[1][2]
• A political viewpoint "that sovereignty is vested not in the people but in the national state, and that all individuals and associations exist only to enhance the power, the prestige, and the well-being of the state. The fascist concept of statism, which as seen as synonymous with the concept of nation, and corporatism repudiates individualism and exalts the nation as an organic body headed by the Supreme Leader and nurtured by unity, force, and discipline."^[3]

Statism is sometimes used to refer to state capitalism or highly regulated market economies with large amounts of government intervention, and also to refer to state socialism or co-operative economic systems that use the state, through nationalization, as a means of running industry in the interest of the majority.

Economic statism in practice

Definition: concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of government often extending to state ownership of industry.

Statism reached its highest point in the centrally planned fascist and Stalinist countries, but exists in varying degrees in every country in the world ^[4] including capitalist countries like USA. Between the end of World War II and the fall of the USSR many Western European nations ran 'mixed' (10-45% public) economies, and in some Asian countries such as Singapore, 60% of the GDP generated in Singapore comes from government-linked companies. State-run industries are part of the public sector, sometimes referred to as the state sector.

See also

• Anti-statism
• Dirigisme
• Right Hegelians, a group of overtly statist German philosophers and thinkers
• Statolatry
• Populism
• Voluntaryism
• State capitalism
• State socialism
• Economic planning

Notes

References

• Mikhail Bakunin (1873), Statism and Anarchy
• Nejatullah Siddiqi (1968), The Ideal of Statism. Islamic Public Economics.

External links

• Merriam Webster Dictionary
• Encyclopedia Britanica
• Wikidictionary
• [1] Definition by The Free Dictionary]
• Essays on Statism (2003). A critical analysis.
• Essays on post-statism (2006). Statism in the social sciences.
• Chapter 9 of The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky
• World's Smallest Political Quiz
• Statism is Dead - A series of videos from Free Domain Radio