ABSTRACT
I was teaching in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher first came to power, introduced her particular brand of Conservatism, and created new myths about leadership. Since 1979 and the election of that first Thatcher Government, a succession of Conservative administrations have introduced a series of radical changes aimed at creating a more market-orientated public sector, characterized by choice and competition, and made more
accountable through a range of performance mechanisms. A major inspiration for Thatcher was the free-market ideologue, Frederick Hayek, who endorsed as his basic tenet what he described as ‘the catallaxy: the spontaneous relations of free market exchange between individuals’ (Wainwright, 1994, p. 42). In The Road to Serfdom, his most popular polemic against socialism (which Secretary of State for Education Keith Joseph made compulsory reading for his civil servants), Hayek argued against any form of state intervention: either by the command economies of communist states, or by Keynesian or moderate social democratic governments (Hayek, 1991). Hayek inspired Thatcher to believe that by withdrawing the state from the economy, she had released, as she herself described it, ‘the spirit of enterprise’ (Wainwright, 1994, p. 62).
