Hayek

On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; on 29 April 1975, the United States scuttled from their Embassy in Saigon - optics that were interpreted as defeats for the ‘International Right’. Yet in 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party; and in 1976 Ronald Reagan almost unseated a sitting Republican Party President. Pivotal to the ‘turn to the Right’ was Friedrich ‘von’ Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science - awarded for having used Austrian Business Cycle Theory to predict the Great Depression: ‘For him it is not a matter of a simple defence of a liberal system of society as may sometimes appear from the popularized versions of his thinking.’