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