In 1987 the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher remarked, apparently off the cuff, 'There is no such thing as society.' A decade earlier, just a couple of months before the election of the Thatcher government in May 1979, Michel Foucault gave a public lecture at the College de France which touched on the source of this infamous claim. Summarising the political thought of Thatcher's intellectual inspiration, Friedrich Hayek, Foucault said that what had been historically proven to be liberalism's ideological weakness vis-a-vis Keynesian planning was its inability to construct an image of the future. Any neoliberal restoration of market ideology therefore needed, according to Hayek, 'a utopia' – a 'general style of thought, analysis, and imagination'[1] – to overturn the hegemony of socialist planning.