The market revolution of the 1970s was no doubt a revolution in economic ideas, but it was far more than that. The war on inflation waged by Thatcher and Reagan was a comprehensive campaign against a threat of social upheaval, which they saw as coming from without and from within. It had the ferocity that it did because in the 1970s and early 1980s, class conflict in Europe, Asia, and the United States was still framed by the global struggles of decolonization and the Cold War.
