ABSTRACT
The present and recent past are best understood as religiose moments. This is to say that, in the world’s increasing embrace of neo-liberalism (and its core the theories of neoclassical economics) over the last two decades or more, for its political-economic salvation, there was a recognition of both grievous error, in the form of extensive state intervention in the economy, and the need to excise it and return to the purity of the free market as informed by the theories of neoclassical economics. Essentially it involved a classical return, ad pristinum statum (the state as it should originally have been), and to the status rectitudinus (the state as it should be). At first, and at best, this was no more than an insurgency against palpably failed and failing regimes – in some cases corrupt regimes – in the name of individual conscience, but it rapidly became, or at least was represented as, something more: the penitential struggle for redemption by a contrite people following their fall. Politically and intellectually, this mandated no less than a search, or, to be more precise, a rediscovery; and almost inescapably, because of the nature of the movement in question, it brought into being what Eugene Honee describes as a ‘double regularity of distortion and discovery.’1 Such was the character of political-economic reformation theory and practice from (say) the early 1970s until the advent of the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom, and the Reagan Administration in the United States of America. To the extent that it was imbued with the spirit and cast of mind of Martin Luther and John Calvin, at its inception at least, the project is to be understood as Reformation.
