ABSTRACT
Introduction The Reagan and Thatcher governments that emerged in America and Britain in the 1970s and which, via their successors, dominated politics for a considerable period, represented a signifi cant break with much previous post-war politics and public policy. Both favoured free-market economics and were critical of the social welfare programmes that had developed in previous decades, arguing that they encouraged people to rely on others rather than taking responsibility for themselves and to assume that the state should provide for them if they were unable, or unwilling, to do so themselves. Put at its most basic, right realism was part of this larger critique, whereas left realism was a reaction to it and to the perception that existing radical theories had little infl uence on or relevance to the new political and economic situation.
