The Radical Right: Universal Means-Testing

Abstract

What was new about radical right ideas was not so much what they said as the social and economic circumstances to which they were applied. In the 1930s, F.A. Hayek’s celebration of the free market could be dismissed as a misdiagnosis of post-1929 events; in the 1970s, what was basically the same analysis attracted a world-wide audience. Had welfare capitalism not experienced such economic shocks it is unlikely that Hayek et al. would have made much of an impact; it did, however, and the accents and the vocabulary of the radical right can now be heard almost everywhere.