Recordar Arthur Seldon (2)

The Times:

ARTHUR SELDON was a prophet of what came to be called Thatcherism. The Thatcherite revolution of the 1970s and 1980s had many roots, but one was certainly a sea change in the intellectual climate of the times, and Seldon played a huge role in that sea change.

For years the State had been seen as the pre-eminent force in managing the economy and providing social security. Seldon was a tireless advocate of replacing the welfare state and of allowing natural economic laws of supply and demand to increase national wealth more effectively than the man in Whitehall could ever do. Not that he had ever been an enthusiast for the Conservative Party. Fundamentally Seldon was an old-fashioned Liberal who believed in the liberty - and responsibility - of the individual.

The causes he espoused, for replacing state welfare by encouragement of the individual to provide for his own care, were dismissed at the time as eccentric or dangerous. He had the satisfaction as a prophet of seeing his ideas absorbed into political thinking, not just by Thatcher's Conservatives but later by Blair's new Labour. What had been dangerous thinking in the 1960s was accepted as sensible and orthodox in the 1990s.