Henri de Man

Henri (Hendrik) de Man (17 November 1885 – 20 June 1953) was a Belgian politician and leader of the Belgian Labour Party (POB-BWP). He was one of the leading socialist theoreticians of his period and, during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, was heavily involved in collaboration. A politically active socialist, he nevertheless fought with the Belgian army and supported the Allied cause in World War I. After the war, he taught sociology for a time at the University of Washington, then started a workers' education school in Belgium, before moving back to Germany where he taught for some years at the University of Frankfurt. He was at odds there with the predominant, leftwing and communist movements surrounding some of his colleagues. He was allied with Eugen Diederichs, a conservative publisher in Jena. Henri de Man's antisemitism, expressed openly in his memoir of 1941, Après Coup, developed during his years in Germany, although he lived in marriage with at least one Jewish woman (Après Coup, Brussels: Éditions de la Toison d'Or, 1941). Returning to Belgium after the Reichstag fire (his books were not popular with Hitler, and de Man was always a maverick relative to others' ideologies) he became Vice President of the Belgian Labour Party (POB-BWP). Upon the death of Emile Vandervelde in 1938, he assumed its presidency. He was Minister of Finance from 1936 to 1938. His views on socialism and his revision of Marxism were controversial. His promotion of the idea of "planisme", or planning, was widely influential in the early 1930s, in particular among the Non-Conformist Movement in France, a movement also called the Third Way; he was connected briefly to the Personalist Emmanuel Mounier, and even thought of himself as something of a "13th century Thomist". The doctrine of Henri de Man intended to overcome the successive crises of capitalism by the nationalization of bank credit and an elevation of the degree of authority of the State in financial affairs, while preserving the structures of a capitalist economic system.