The political commitment to an active role for government in managing the economy was largely a post-war development - at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. The retreat from that position, to a harder emphasis on the discipline of market forces and on 'sound' finance, is even more recent: it set in from about 1968 onwards, gathering pace during the Seventies. Now, in the mid-Eighties, both the feasibility and the desirability of government action to manage the economy are widely doubted. Little seems to be left of the consensus view that prevailed in the golden age of the Fifties and Sixties - of a benign administration actively engaged in promoting economic welfare by ensuring full utilisation of resources, and by appropriate (if, in practice, modest) measures of redistribution towards the needy.

LRB 15 November 1984 | PDF Download