The Role of Government in the Economy

The notion that government is a necessary evil, the ideal of the nightwatchman state, was never a strain of any consequence in Chinese or Japanese political thought. That government should, those countries believed, and in the proper hands could, be a repository of virtuous and benevolent leadership was an almost universal assumption among rulers and rebels alike. It was the justification, in fact, for rebellion against tyrants who failed in benevolence. This chapter shows how the anarchists of the 1920s and the neoliberals of the 1980s all derived their inspiration from foreign not traditional sources.