Sara’s Reviews > Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983 > Status Update
Sara
is on page 97
"Attlee's government passing into legislation much of what had first been conceived of by the Fabians nearly fifty years earlier" - the origin of the neoliberal obsession with think-tanks can be ascribed to the fabled influence of Fabianism on postwar politics. Not seeing the irresistible forces that led to the switch to 'collectivism' (other than pamphlets, or the LSE) is at the basis of flawed history making.
— Aug 17, 2014 12:41AM
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Sara’s Previous Updates
Sara
is on page 330
"As it was, economic liberalism as applied in the 1980s effectively wiped out a large part of Britain's manufacturing industry and, at the end of a decade of economic experiment and dislocation, left as many people unemployed as there were in the 1930s".
— Aug 17, 2014 07:21AM
Sara
is on page 324
"Whilst to her many detractors Mrs Thatcher always seemed to be a wild-eyed, hand-bagging revolutionary, to her advisers she was a cautious, insecure pragmatist, who eventually paid the price of not capitalizing on her electoral success early or boldly enough".
— Aug 17, 2014 07:20AM
Sara
is on page 319
"The moment when radical thinking became a 'political embarassment' signalled the end of the counter-revolution that had animated Thatcherism in the first place."
— Aug 17, 2014 07:19AM
Sara
is on page 316
"Margaret Thatcher's government did not, in fact, succeed in controlling, let alone cutting expenditure on the public services. The spending grew strongly in real terms" - QED. With all Thatcher's awe for Hayek & Co., the 'economic liberal' bandwagon was only good at providing the talking points. Neoliberalism was to emerge as imperialist as Victorian laissez-faire could only have dreamt of.
— Aug 17, 2014 07:18AM
Sara
is on page 307
"The mission of ATLAS is to litter the world with free-market think-tanks"
— Aug 17, 2014 02:44AM
Sara
is on page 45
"The moment when economists and politicians accepted Keynes's alternative, mild inflation, to class war was the moment when the class war was effectively won by the industrial proletariat" - true. The class war was won by the imperial proletariat, and lost by the dispossessed masses of the British empire, which are not even worth a line in Keynes's, Fabian or liberal policy recommendations.
— Aug 15, 2014 01:03PM
Sara
is on page 39
"We have no such thing as 'Industry'. What we have is series of different industries.."
— Aug 15, 2014 12:55PM
Sara
is on page 20
Ortega y Gasset: "The mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. (...) The mass-man does in fact believe that he is the state, and he will tend more and more to sets its machinery working on whatever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it".
— Aug 15, 2014 12:53PM
Sara
is on page 14
"The Fabians, through their tactics of 'gradualism' and 'permeation', sought to persuade 'all' political parties of the virtues of their programme"
— Aug 15, 2014 12:47PM
Sara
is on page 6
Hayek: "A free society can never be defined as a sum of known particular results to be achieved, but only as an abstract order which as a whole is notnoriented on any particular concrete ends but provides merely the best chance for any members selected at random successfully to use his knowledge for his purposes. (...) We may call such a free society a nomocratic (law-governed) (...) social order."
— Aug 15, 2014 12:43PM
