This fascinating book is about the world's economic history in the last half century (since WWII), with occasional glimpses before that time. Its thesis is that world markets have captured (or at least are in the process of capturing) the high ground, the commanding heights, in their struggle with governments for control. The book tries (and succeeds very well) to explain how and why this happened and who the people were who made it happen. It is encouraging to think this battle of ideas is over, but I'm not so sure. It seems to me like this battle continues to rage on as antimarket forces seek to hold onto their power.
During WWI, some of the leading Progressive writers began to use the word liberalism as a substitute for progressivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who had run and lost on a Progressive third-party ticket. Traditional liberals were not happy to see their label transformed. In the 1920s, The New York Times criticized "the expropriation of the time-honored word 'liberal'" and argued that "the Radical-Red school of thought...hand back the word 'liberal' to its original owners." During the early 1930s, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt duked it out as to who was the true liberal. Roosevelt won, adopting the term to ward off accusations of being left-wing. He could declare that liberalism was "plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life." And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government's role in the economy.
Chapters:
Sir Keith Joseph, the "Mad Monk," initiated the shift in Britain from welfare statism to 'Thatcherism.' Unhappy with status quo [i.e. Keynesian] conservatism (he was elected a conservative MP in 1956), he connected (ca. 1960) with the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), "which had become the island of [classical] liberal economic thinking in the midst of Britain's Keynsian consensus." IEA was headed by cofounder Ralph Harris (cofounder Arthur Seldon ran its research program). The IEA had once been presented to Harris as "an anti-Fabian society" (79). In 1974, Joseph established his own free-market institute, the Centre for Policy Studies. "Although Joseph saw the Fabian socialists as the originators of Britain's ills, he modeled his strategy on that of the Fabians - to change culture and politics by influencing opinion makers" (80). While IEA was academic in orientation, CPS was more overtly political ("My aim was to convert the Tory Party"). Margaret Thatcher became CPS vice-chairman, Alfred Sherman its director of studies. Joseph compiled a now-famous 29-item reading list.
See:
Morrison Halcrow, Keith Joseph: A Single Mind, 1989.
Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983, 1995
...to be continued