On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [Interesting point from John Gray. Maybe troublesome for those of us who
> like fluidity and sexual radicalism as well as socialist political economy?]
>
> <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/john-gray/thatcher-thatcher-thatcher>
>
> It is usually a mistake to suppose that politicians are much influenced by
> the thinkers they are fond of quoting: though Thatcher cited The Road to
> Serfdom more than once it is unclear whether she had read anything of Hayek.
> Yet she fully shared Hayek’s view that free markets reinforce ‘traditional
> values’, which is an inversion of their actual effect. The conservative
> country of which she dreamed had more in common with Britain in the 1950s,
> an artefact of Labour collectivism, than it did with the one that emerged
> from her free-market policies. A highly mobile labour market enforces a
> regime of continuous change. The type of personality that thrives in these
> conditions is the opposite of the stolid, dutiful bourgeois Thatcher
> envisioned. Skill in re-inventing yourself is the key virtue, along with a
> readiness to cut your losses as soon as any commitment becomes unprofitable
> or unexciting. Thatcher’s economic revolution was meant to go along with
> something like a social restoration. Instead, it led to Britain as it is
> today, a society obsessed with the idea of personal self-realisation, more
> liberal in sexual matters, less monocultural and less class-bound, more
> insecure and more unequal.
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319