The Triumph of the ‘Free Market’

Abstract

The global history of the past three decades, during which the western world’s comparative standing and fortunes have plummeted, has seen the widespread propagation and acceptance in the western world of a number of significant and game-changing ideas — about how economies should be run, how societies should function, and how the relationship between the individual and the state should be managed. It has been a period that has seen a conclusive victory for doctrines that, until quite recently, were dismissed as the preserve of a small and extreme minority on the fringes of politics, economics and philosophy.