Thinking the unthinkable - Richard Cockett

This is a book about how ideas become policies; a book about how the notions of a handful of economic theorists changed the lives of millions of citizens who have never even heard of them. It is also a governmental detective story: were the ideas that everybody found so radical in the 1980s? Where did they come from? Would their theoretical parents recognize them in practice in today's Britain (or Canada or New Zealand )?;It unearths the stories of how economic liberalism resurfaced on the Austro-British intelligentsia in the late 1930s (while Keynesian economics reigned triumphant world-wide), was discussed and refined at conferences attended by a handful of devotees in the 1940s and 1950s, and then began to be taken up by a new generation of Tories in the late 1960s, whose political education was undertaken by the "think-tanks" like the IEA and CPS that have sprung up to spread the new gospel of free-market truth. It is the influence of the policies formulated in such think-tanks on the reconstruction of British society undertaken by the Thatcher governments that is the meat of this book.