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The Rise of Conservative Capitalism: Ideological Tensions within the Reagan and Thatcher Governments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Kenneth R. Hoover
Kenneth R. Hoover
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin—Parkside
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Extract

The phrase liberal capitalism has occasionally been used in contemporary political criticism to lump together the ideological approaches of nonsocialist political parties and to suggest that there are few significant differences among those who generally support a market-based political economy. C. B. Macpherson, in an influential essay entitled The Real World of Democracy (1965), argues that “by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system, the liberal state did not abandon its fundamental nature; it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had been created by the competitive market society.” As a first approximation then, liberal capitalism appears to stand for a combination of rational contractualism, utilitarian individualism, and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith.

Type
Comparative Politics
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 1987 , pp. 245 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1987

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References

This article is based in part on a paper prepared for the XIII World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, July 1985. I would like to thank Norman Cloutier, Mark Kann. Thomas Moore, and Raymond Plant for their suggestions in writing this article.

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70 Lelyveld, Joseph, “Thatcher Government Upset over a Critical Church Report,” New York Times, 2 12 1985, p. 11Google Scholar.

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79 According to Federal Reserve Board data, the annual net acquisition of United States assets by foreigners has more than tripled in the period 1980–85. Cf. Andrew Gamble's distinction between “liberal political economy” and “national political economy” in Gamble, Britain In Decline, 133 et passim.

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