3 UTOPIA ENTERS THE MAINSTREAM

1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History, New York, Scribner’s, 1949. Cited in Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria, London, Victor Gollancz, 1964, p.10.

2. Thatcher’s remark is cited by Jason Burke in ‘The history man: a profile of Francis Fukuyama’, Observer, 27 June 2004.

3. For an account of how laissez-faire was engineered in early Victorian England, see my False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, London and New York, Granta Books, 1999, pp. 7–17.

4. Hoskyns’ paper was presented at a private dinner in late 1977. So far as I know it has not been published. It is archived at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

5. Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, London, Pan Books, 1993, p. 113.

6. For a brilliantly perceptive account of the rise and dominance of Thatcherism, see Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts, London, Allen Lane, 2006.

7. Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History, Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1972, p. 81.

8. Smith’s thought has been the subject of a number of valuable recent studies. See especially Charles L. Griswold Jr, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, and Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2001.

9. Griswold Jr, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, p. 302.

10. Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order, pp. 78–9.

11. For an examination of the role of economics as a contemporary religion, see Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

12. I discuss some common misunderstandings of Spencer’s thought in Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, London and New York, Routledge, 1989, Chapter 6, pp. 89–102.

13. I have given a critical assessment of Hayek as a liberal theorist in my Hayek on Liberty, 3rd edn, London and New York, Routledge, 1998, pp. 146–61.

14. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston, Beacon Press, 1944, p. 140.

15. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, London, Routledge, 1960, p. 57.

16. ibid., p. 61.

17. Blair’s statement was made to the Labour party conference in September 2004 as part of a defence of his role in the Iraq war. See Guardian, 29 September 2004.

18. For samples of neo-conservative thinking, see Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neo-conservatism, London, Atlantic Books, 2005, which contains a contribution by Tony Blair; and Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, Free Press, 1995.

19. John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, London and New York, Free Press, 2004, p. 173.

20. Tony Blair, prime minister’s speeches, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp

21. ibid.

22. Tony Blair, speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, 1 August 2006.

23. Tony Blair, ‘Defence – Our Nation’s Future’, 12 January 2007, http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10735.asp

24. See Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: The True Story of the Iraq War, London, Politico’s, 2005, pp. 62–6, 131–3. See also Brian Jones, ‘What they didn’t tell US about WMD’, New Statesman, 11 December 2006.

25. BBC News World Edition, 5 February 2003, ‘Leaked report rejects Iraqi al-Qaeda link’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2727471.stm

26. The quote from the ‘Iraq Options’ paper is cited by Henry Porter, ‘It’s clear. The case for war was cooked up’, Observer, 5 November 2006.

27. Gary Leupp, ‘Faith-based intelligence’, Counterpunch, 26 July 2003.

28. A full version of the memo together with other leaked documents (including Jack Straw’s memo to Blair of 25 March 2002) can be seen at www.downingstreetmemo.com

29. For an account of the meeting at which Bush and Blair agreed to go to war whatever the UNdecided, see Philippe Sands, Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules, 2nd edn, London, Penguin, 2006.

30. Bush’s offer to Blair is detailed in Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004. The conversation between Bush and Blair was published in an excerpt from Woodward’s book on www.washingtonpost.com on 24 April 2004, under the title ‘Blair steady in support’.

31. For a penetrating account of political lying in the Blair era, see Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying, London and New York, Free Press, 2005.

32. Raymond Aron, Foreword to Alain Besançon, The Soviet Syndrome, trans. Patricia Ranum, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, pp. xvii–xviii.