The art of the impossible

Editorial // Ben Jackson

How did the right turn the economic crisis of the 1970s to their lasting political advantage? Can the strategy and tactics pursued by the right in their years of political exile be adopted by the left?

Corporations and the rise of American conservatism

Feature // Kim Phillips-Fein

Beneath the surface of the post-war years, business leaders outraged by the New Deal found ways to bring about the slow revolution that would culminate in Reagan’s victory.

Economists and the rise of neo-liberalism

Feature // Roger Backhouse

The political climate since the 1980s is the opposite of that discerned by Hayek in 1949. The fashionable wisdom is to be sceptical about government and overlook the problems with markets.

The neo-liberal thought collective

Feature // Philip Mirowski

The founders of the Mont Pelerin Society succeeded in constructing and deploying elaborate social machinery designed to collect, create, debate, disseminate and mobilise neo-liberal ideas.

Mistaken lessons and dangers for the left

Feature // Steve Davies

As the current crisis discredits free markets and deregulation, is there an opening for a coherent body of ideas advocating a more collectivist and interventionist approach? Maybe not.

Macro-economic crisis and policy revolution

Feature // Hugh Pemberton

The speed and scope of policy innovation since the present crisis broke has been noteworthy. The question is whether this presages a shift to a new and more social democratic framework.

The new politics of media ownership

Commentary // Joy Johnson

Media ownership and regulation are not minority issues, relics from lost battles of the eighties. The concentration of private ownership vividly demonstrates why we need public provision of news.

The crisis in thinking about the crisis

Essay // Merlin Chowkwanyun

‘Is this the end of neo-liberalism?’ is the wrong question to be asking. The right one is more like: ‘what would a movement to end neo-liberalism look like?’

Assets, equality and the crisis

Commentary // Rajiv Prabhakar

Building an egalitarian property-owning democracy could form part of a renewed Keynesian political economy. This entails crafting policies that attack wealth inequality directly.

New Labour and housing

Response // Ian Hall

Hemmed in by political pressures and the mantra that rising house prices must be a good thing, the government appears intent on plastering over the cracks to maintain an artificial boom.

The making of neo-liberalism

Review essay // William Davies

Any critic of neo-liberalism must disentangle the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’ and resucitate the Aristotelian sense that public discourse is a superior human capacity to private consumption.

Richard Vinen: Thatcher’s Britain

Review // Gregg McClymont

Vinen insists that Thatcherism was the product of a particular historical period: the 1970s.