Abstract

The disintegration of East European regimes is not an isolated phenomenon, for it is only the latest and most dramatic manifestation of a process which has been unfolding over the past two decades throughout the world. It has to be seen as an expression of the state's failure to achieve particular economic goals it set for itself. Thus the crisis of the interventionist state necessitates the construction of new political forms that can both articulate and legitimate alternative economic strategies.

Although it was the Right which rode the political wave of the 1980s, the New Left, during the 1960s and the 1970s, had articulated an equally powerful critique of the state.