ABSTRACT
During the 1970s conservative intellectuals in both the USA and the UK mounted a vigorous moral campaign against various forms of ‘deviance’ and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher was to make crime a major and successful election issue for the first time in post-war Britain. Her general concern was to re-establish what she considered to be ‘Victorian values’ and to this end targeted the supposed debilitating permissive society of the 1960s and its perceived legitimisation in ‘soft’ social science. For this political ‘new right’, the economic, technological and managerial achievements of the modern world should be safeguarded and expanded, but at the same time there should be a comprehensive assault mounted on its cultural and ethical components. Indeed, it was perceived to be this modernist culture with its emphasis on subjective values and individual self expression that was crucially undermining the motivational requirements of an efficient economy and rational state administration. In short, individuals were seen as increasingly unwilling to achieve and even less prepared to obey (Habermas, 1989). Populist conservatives thus sought a revival in past tradition, in the values of the state, schools, family, and implicitly, in the unquestioned acceptance of authority.
