ABSTRACT
The record of governments influenced by neoconservative political agendas seems to indicate there is no escape from the principle that modern organisational complexity demands that the steering, regulating and directive powers of the state enter into how the relationships between all parts of society are articulated. Over the course of this century the business of government has become extraordinarily complex and its scope has grown. Three particular historical developments accelerated this development of the modern interventionist state. First, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the response to it in the form of public economic policies, both fiscal and monetary, entailed more direct and systematic management and steering of the economy by government. Indeed, in a global economy of ‘restructuring’, there is likely to be a tendency for the administrative state at national and provincial levels to free up as much activity as possible to permit flexibility of response and to encourage a general ethos of ‘management for change’.
