By the second half of the 1980s, the political scientist Jeffrey Henig has noted, privatization “moved from an intellectual fringe to become a centerpiece in contemporary public policy debates.” The Virginia school of political economy in particular helped effect “the intellectual de-legitimation of the welfare state,” which prepared the way for privatization and, with it, in the words of one enthusiast, “the goal of fundamentally and irreversibly changing” the nature of politics.48
