Liberalism, Conservatism and the New Right

Abstract

The 1970s were years of economic difficulty in most advanced industrial societies in contrast to the prosperity of the preceding decades. The widely accepted post-war Keynesian welfare state consensus (Jessop, 1980) was criticised and challenged. Academics coined terms such as ‘ungovernability’ and ‘political overload’ to describe the political system during this period of crisis (Rose and Peters, 1978; King, 1975; Crozier et al., 1975; Birch, 1984). Criticisms of the political system were joined with attacks upon conventional economic policy orthodoxy. On the one hand, Keynesian policies were rejected as ineffective under the new economic conditions: the assumption that high unemployment and high inflation would not occur simultaneously (the Phillips curve) was the principal evidence of this redundancy. On the other hand, the competitive political party system was accused of placing excessive demands upon the political system to provide goods and services it no longer had the revenues to finance. At least these were the interpretations propagated by New Right advocates.