Alas, such an uncompromising approach was always likely to come to blows – if not inflict a few of its own – in the real world. And for all that neoliberalist development policy may with reason claim to have overcome some of the problems of earlier development approaches – an overreliance on the state as the main agent of change, say – it soon become clear it had also ignored their most important lessons. Most neoliberals, for example, were convinced that the structuralism of earlier development economists betrayed an excessively political bent to which their own, more "scientific" theories were immune.