ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, but especially in the West, a free market–oriented and conservative liberalism made a triumphant comeback in the early eighties. Some historians have presented the neoliberal change of course of the early 1980s as the logical outcome of structural economic developments, a necessary re-adjustment of policies to new economic circumstances. In Western Europe, the early 1980s saw a similar transformation, a withering away of the political paradigm that the state or the government, prompted by – and co-operating with – collectivist institutions, should reduce inequalities, stimulate emancipation, and bring society as a whole to a higher level of development. The outcome of the long seventies was thus – at least in the Western world – the development of a more individualistic society, with all its social and economic problems, but also with renewed dynamism and mobility, stimulated by promising technological innovations.
