During his inaugural address as the fortieth president of the United States
of America in January 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke of the ‘economic ills we
[Americans] suffer that have come upon us over several decades’. In a line
that was to become emblematic of his presidency he went on to suggest that
‘in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem’. Over the following decade, elected politicians
and unelected officials in an ever-greater number of countries attempted, in
Margaret Thatcher’s (1993: 745) preferred terminology, ‘to roll back the
frontiers of the state’. In this task they were assisted by an intellectual
revolution in the study of politics the full effects of which were, at this time,
only just beginning to be fully appreciated.