Konservatisme, nyliberalisme og statsdrift : høyres syn på statseid industri 1945–1981

Abstract

It has been claimed that the Norwegian conservative party Hoyre's economic policies in the postwar years amounted to stubbornly resisting, but eventually going along with the Labour party, Arbeiderpartiet. This article shows how Hoyre in fact actively supported state-owned industry in many cases, and found ways of defending this in line with their conservative ideals. Hoyre's policies in these years do not prove the infamous canard that all Norwegians are social democrats, but instead tells us something about how the content of labels like social democratic and conservative are unstable and historically contingent. In the postwar years it was unclear to most what a conservative economic policy really meant, and this article sees Hoyre's attempts at defining such a thing in conjunction with the simultaneous development of neoliberalism as a transnational political project, with which Hoyre would only come into close contact some decades later. The early neoliberals, organized in The Mont Pelerin Society from 1947, wanted a strong state to spread and safeguard market mechanisms. Our study thus exemplifies how the image of economic policies as a pendulum swinging between state and market is a simplification, and often misleading.