Dirigisme is an economy in which the government exerts strong directive influence. It designates a mainly capitalist economy with strong directive, as opposed to merely regulatory, economic participation by the state.

Most modern economies can be characterized as dirigiste to some degree – for instance, state economic action may be exercised through subsidizing research and developing new technologies, or through government procurement, especially military (i.e. a form of mixed economy). Since the late 1980s, the economy of the People's Republic of China can be described as a a dirigiste economy, as it is a heavily state-directed market economy.

Dirigisme is from the French. In English it is also "dirigism", although both spellings are used by the OED.

Before the Second World War, France had a relatively fragmented capitalist economic system. The many small companies, often family-owned, were often not dynamic and efficient^{[citation needed]} in comparison to the large industrial groups in Germany or the United States.

Owen Hatherley (born 24 July 1981 in Southampton, UK) is a British writer and journalist based in London who writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture.

His first book Militant Modernism was published by Zero Books in 2009. The Guardian described the book as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism".Icon described the book as "sparky, polemical and ferociously learned" although it "falters a little towards the end", whilst Jonathan Meades in New Statesman described the book as a "deflected Bildungsroman of a very clever, velvet-gloved provocateur nostalgic for yesterday’s tomorrow, for a world made before he was born, a distant, preposterously optimistic world which, even though it still exists in scattered fragments, has had its meaning erased, its possibilities defiled" and Hatherley "as a commentator on architecture...in a school of one". The journal Planning Perspectives suggested that the book "nicely explores the irony of the potential status of the remains of future-oriented architecture and urban design as ‘modern heritage'"