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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:53 2006 |
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Anthony Waterman wrote:
> The background to my hasty intervention (which I am already beginning to
> regret) is, of course, Margaret Thatcher's famous aphorism: 'There's no
> such thing as society'; one of those self-evident propositions like
> Milton Friedman's (was it he?) 'There's no free lunch'.
A point of clarification, and hopefully more than mere pedantry. Thatcher's
'no such thing as society' was widely cited out of context. In her own
words, 'The error to which I was objecting was the confusion of society
with the state as the helper of first resort'; that 'society was not an
abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living
structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations'
(Thatcher The Downing Street Years, p. 626).
Roger Middleton
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