A year ago, in an editorial, New Blackfriars was complaining that the theological understanding of what Mrs Thatcher had been doing to Britain had ‘hardly even begun’.

The complaint could have been generalized. To judge by the standard of the public debate at the 1987 General Election, any in-depth understanding of Thatcherism, despite the decade of evidence on which it could draw, was non-existent. Even now it is still in its infancy. A government which claims to have wrested intellectual supremacy from the left and to be full of ideas, and which is if anything rather pleased with itself when its opponents accuse it of sacrificing something or other on the altar of ideology, has nonetheless provoked no coherent theoretical critique to speak of from its public opponents, hardly anything other than mesmerized horror.

Is it the indisputable authority of seemingly unending power that has reduced the critical mind to silence? Or is Mrs Thatcher perhaps right? Has a philosopher-queen inaugurated a republic in which all the questions of political economy, having been answered, no longer need to be asked?

Hardly. The massive paradoxes of the Thatcher years—their blatancy must partly account for the opposition’s bewilderment— demand explanation, and, like any explanation of human affairs, that explanation will of course have a theological dimension. I am not, though, a theologian. Surely, however, the launching of a really satisfactory ‘theological critique’ of Thatcherism at least partly depends on the opening up of a rather more general discussion of Thatcherism, and what I am offering here is a contritibution to this.