A 5-minute read | sociological perspectives, condensed
Full study notes: Sociological Perspectives: The New Right, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families… It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbour.”
— Margaret Thatcher, interview for Woman’s Own, 1987
Thatcher said this partway through her third term as Prime Minister. Critics read it as a rejection of collective responsibility. Supporters read it as a call for individuals and families to take charge of their own lives, rather than waiting for the state to act.
In a nutshell
The New Right is a structural, consensus perspective. It fuses two older traditions: neoliberalism (free-market economics, associated with Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) and neoconservatism (defending traditional institutions such as marriage and religion). It became government policy under Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979-1990) and Ronald Reagan in the United States.
Like functionalism, the New Right treats institutions as working best when they perform their proper role. Unlike functionalism, it reaches openly political conclusions: the state should intervene as little as possible, and a large welfare state is treated as actively harmful, undermining the self-reliance it was meant to protect.
Right realism applies the same logic to crime: offenders make a rational choice, so policing and deterrence work better than tackling root causes. Peter Saunders claimed Britain already functions as a meritocracy; Richard Breen reanalysed Saunders’ own data and found class origin still shapes outcomes strongly.
| Key terms |
| New Right: a structural, consensus perspective combining free-market economics with traditional social values, influential on UK and US government policy from the late 1970s. |
| Neoliberalism: the economic strand of New Right thinking, arguing free markets and minimal state intervention produce the best outcomes (Hayek, Friedman). |
| Neoconservatism: the social strand of New Right thinking, defending traditional institutions such as marriage and religion as sources of social order. |
| Underclass: a group cut off from mainstream society, said by Charles Murray to be shaped by long-term welfare dependency rather than low income alone. |
| Meritocracy: a society in which people’s position is decided mainly by their own ability and effort, rather than family background. |
| Perspective | View on welfare and the underclass | Key thinker | Main criticism |
| New Right | Welfare should be minimal and targeted. Generous, unconditional benefits create a dependency culture. | Murray (1984, 1989); Marsland (1996) | Assumes claimants choose dependency; most lone parents want paid work. |
| Functionalism | Welfare performs a positive function, cushioning economic misfortune and maintaining solidarity. | Durkheim’s concept of social solidarity | Does not explain why welfare varies so widely between similar capitalist societies. |
| Marxism | Welfare is a concession that keeps workers loyal to capitalism, without fixing its inequalities. | Gough (1979) | Underestimates the genuine, lasting gains welfare has delivered for workers. |
| Feminism | The welfare state assumes and reinforces women’s unpaid caring role within the family. | Wilson (1977) | The New Right responds this ignores growing numbers of male claimants. |
Table 1: Perspectives compared on welfare and the underclass.
Evaluating the New Right, fast
- Strength: Peter Saunders’ data suggested Britain functions as a genuine meritocracy, rewarding ability and effort.
- Strength: Thatcher and Reagan’s electoral success shows New Right ideas found real public support, not just elite backing.
- Strength: broken windows policing is credited by some criminologists with falling crime rates in several cities where it was applied.
- Weakness: Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) was widely condemned for reviving genetic determinist arguments about intelligence, race and class.
- Weakness: Richard Breen’s (1999) reanalysis of Saunders’ own data found that class origin still shapes outcomes strongly, undermining the meritocracy claim.
- Weakness: Bill Jordan’s critique of Marsland suggests the New Right overstates how generous UK welfare provision actually is.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| Across family, welfare, education and crime, the New Right consistently explains social problems as the product of individual or institutional incentives rather than unequal structures, a position closer to functionalism’s consensus view than to Marxist or feminist conflict theories. | The Bell Curve controversy and Breen’s reanalysis of Saunders both suggest the New Right’s evidence base is more contested than its confident policy conclusions imply. The 2026 removal of the UK’s two-child benefit limit continues to test its central claims about welfare dependency. |
| Key Takeaways |
| The New Right fuses neoliberalism’s free-market economics with neoconservatism’s traditional social values. |
| It became UK and US government policy under Thatcher and Reagan from the late 1970s. |
| Saunders’ meritocracy thesis is directly challenged by Breen (1999) using Saunders’ own data. |
| Right realism applies New Right ideas to crime, treating offenders as rational actors who weigh costs and rewards. |
| Check your understanding |
| 1. Outline two New Right beliefs about welfare and the family. You could: choose two from minimal welfare, promoting marriage, and treating benefits as conditional, and attach a named thinker to each. |
| 2. To what extent does the New Right’s account of social problems hold up against the evidence? You should: use Saunders’ meritocracy claim as evidence for, Breen’s (1999) reanalysis as evidence against, then reach an explicit judgement. |
Specification links: AQA 7192 3.1.1 (Education); 3.2.2 (Families and Households); 3.2.1 (Culture and Identity); 3.2.7 (The Media); 3.2.5 (Beliefs in Society); 3.3.1 (Crime and Deviance); 3.1.3 and 3.3.2 (Theory and Methods).