Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983

by Richard Cockett

There is another modern British history - an alternative tradition in our government, politics and economics. It is a history kept rather quiet, a tradition largely hidden from view - suspiciously well hidden, some would say. Thatcher seemed to hit Britain like a thunderbolt from the blue, but her ideas, her policies, her strategies and her vision had all been forged long before she ever arrived at Downing Street. They were first contrived by the anti-Keynesian economist, Friedrich Hayek, the man whose writings inspired Thatcher in all she did. He and his followers began, after World War II, the difficult and uphill task of countering the rise of socialistic collectivism. They were the economic liberals. Among their shock troops, their vanguard of revolutionaries, were Milton Friedman, Alan Walters, Keith Joseph, Ralph Harris, Alfred Sherman, John Biffen and Geoffrey Howe. Theirs was a long, gruelling fight, but in the mid-1970s, they found their ideal secret weapon. Within five years that weapon was running the country, and the rest is history, retold here in a new way. Richard Cockett is the author of "Twilight of Chamberlain, Appeasement and the Manipulation of the Press", and "David Astor and the 'Observer'".

Genres: History, Politics, Economics, British Literature, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Richard Cockett is Southeast Asia editor and correspondent at The Economist. He is the author of several books, the most recent being Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Neoliberals in shining armour

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I came to this prehistoric book from Mirowski's Never let a Serious crisis go to waste, where it is quoted as an important source. Surprisingly, the source undercuts rather than reinforce Mirowski's arguments.

This book is the account from a neoliberal standpoint of how neoliberal or 'economic liberal' or 'free-market' think-tanks established in the UK since the 1950s helped spread Hayek's 'ideas' under the dictatorship of the 'collectivist' keynesian creed, to the point of influencing Margaret Thatcher's policy, and were then let down by Margaret herself, who found them 'embarassing'. This rag-to-riches-and-back-again story is revealing, contra Mirowski, of the limited role that 'ideas' or ridiculous clubs such as the Mont Pélerin Society have played in the rise of neoliberalism, whose survival has to be ascribed to other, more powerful forces. As Saskia Sassen points out in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, in the case of neoliberalism, explaining X with non-X, as opposed to factors inherent to X, is a particularly relevant epistemological principle.

Thatcherism, understood as the policy of free-markets and the strong state, used Hayek's ideas only in passing, as clearly emerges in the book from the free-markets think-tanks' vocal frustration, and actually built on the strong foundations laid down by thirty years of financial deregulation in London's off-shore Euromarkets, the switch to oil as the main energetic resource, and the profit crisis from which an empire-less Britain was unable to disentangle itself, despite the help from the IMF.

Thatcher's neo-imperial project was successful and long-lasting especially where she distanced herself from Hayek's theories, e.g. when she replaced state monopolies with private monopolies (as the author concedes), or used exchange and interest rates to wipe out Britain's industrial sector to benefit the financiers. But this programme is never articulated in a manifesto: it's unspeakable, and the free-markets think-tanks did not understand it, in their fundamentally amateurish approach to economics. So Mirowski's argument for a neoliberal double truth is probably overstated, as neoliberalism is never theorized, but simply enforced, despite the many 'thinkers' willing to jump on its bandwagon that eagerly volunteer to speak for it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hayek's second cousin, famoulsy wrote, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".

The book eventually unwittingly dwarfs Hayek's stature, especially in comparison to Keynes, who is depicted as the titanic son of a bitch that saved capitalism from the otherwise dire consequences of empire-lessness.

[Rogerio Mattos · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting historical account of the initial implementation of Frederick Haiyek's ideas of think tanks in the British context.

[Jayden Davidson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a slog. The book is rather repetitive and the main thesis is pretty simple: a few ‘trailblazing economic liberals’ took on the dominant ideas of the time and eventually won out in Thatcher’s Conservative Government. It’s very light on the detail of exactly how economic liberalism prevailed and through what channels. Instead relies heavily on simply explaining what people were saying at what times and asserting that this eventually influenced government.

[Doni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book did an excellent job of detailing the inter-relationships among all the players of 'liberal economic' think-tanks since the 1930's. It was a bit short-shifted on explaining the ideas themselves, often only mentioning paper titles. It has an unmistakable bias in favor of liberal economism (free-market ideology with as little interference from government as possible.) The most ridiculous way this manifested was that it discounted political economists for combining economics with politics, which only makes sense if you are coming from a liberal economic perspective.