My full-length study of the relation between a free market and a free society was eventually published in 1973 under the title Capitalism and the permissive society (Brittan 1973a). It is still available under the title A restatement of economic liberalism (Brittan 1988) and its conclusions are summarized in Brittan (1995d), but its main value lies in the detailed explorations en route.

The conclusion of my study of Hayek and Friedman (as well as of other writers) was that neither had supplied adequate criteria for differentiating between good and bad types of government intervention, although I drew ideas from both of them and from the then new school of Public Choice, better called the 'economics of politics'. I went to press before the appearance of Rawls's Theory of justice (Rawls 1972), but was able to pick up his guiding ideas from his earlier articles and managed to formulate for myself a distinction between his contractarian method - which still provides the best hope of disinterested discussion of contentious public issues - and his much more dubious specific principles.

The part of my book in which my heart lay, however, was the less formal prologue, which identified with the permissive values of the 1960s, but attacked the radicals of the time for the failure to see that market capitalism embodied their own emphasis on 'doing your own thing'. While Left or right is my favourite among my books, Capitalism and the permissive society is the one by which I would want to be judged.

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