ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and the 1990s, a number of radical accounts were developed which sought to explain the apparent ‘revolution’ in state policy associated with the demise of social democracy and the rise of conservative governments around the globe. Numerous explanatory dichotomies (often cross-cutting and overlapping) were introduced such as the movement from ‘keynesianism to monetarism’; from ‘fordism to post-fordism’; from ‘collectivist post-war consensus to neoliberalism’ and from ‘national to global systems of capitalism’. Alongside such characterisations there appeared other more idiosyncratic attempts to capture the novelty of political and economic change focusing on ‘the free economy and the strong state’ and the influence of personality in terms of theories of ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganism’ (Clarke, 1988; Kavanagh, 1990; Bonefeld, 1993; Gamble, 1994).
