Abstract

I spent last year teaching in Paris and when I came home for visits, Emil and I would play the analogy game between Western European and American political tendencies. Besides the obvious matches between Reagan, Thatcher and Chirac, we talked of the similarities between George Will and Ian Gilmore, the intellectual spokesman for the Tory Wets, both of whom drew on the same stock of quotes from Bolingbroke, Hume and Burke. But what of the American neo-liberals? Who were their counterparts? Despite some obvious similarities between the British Social Democrats and some of the French high-tech socialists, it was difficult to compare the neo-liberals to any other European formation.