In 1987, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that “there is no such thing as society” (McSmith, 2010). I was startled by that statement when it was made in 1987, and I remain startled by it, 37 years later. At this time, I had undertaken both mainstream economics and political economy at The University of Sydney, where the question of whether economics needed to be understood as existing within a larger social system was a fundamental point of disagreement, to the point where students — some of whom would become future Prime Ministers — would occupy buildings and the iconic Quadrangle Clock Tower in order to make this point.
