ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on research project on economic policy, class interests and forms of state. It could be argued that monetarism constitutes a distinctive ideological initiative which attempts to secure hegemony for City interests at the broadest level of social and economic policy. This theme meets all the familiar problems in the location of ideologies in relation to classes and fractions. The advance of monetarism as a theoretical innovation in British economics has never been divorced from policy prescriptions. Thatcherite monetarism must be seen, therefore, as a broad response to economic, political and academic crises which revives and recasts many of the traditional themes of classical liberalism concerning economic processes and the role of the state. The chapter suggests that whatever the relationship between monetarism and class interests, in Britain ‘technical’ monetarism developed into a full-blown ‘monetarist politics’ through a combination of economic dominance and temporary hegemony for financial capital.
