Reality was not so simple. Liberals, Christian democrats and conservatives lived the collapse of communism with the exhilarating satisfaction of those who had unexpectedly turned out to be on the right side of History. They had denounced communism not as the wrong application of a just principle - socialism - but as the inevitable consequence of a deleterious ideology carried to its logical conclusion. Without the market, they claimed, there could be no freedom. No conscious mechanism for the allocation of resources could provide greater happiness than the innumerable decisions of millions of individual consumers.

Whatever the ambition of their supporters, green parties were unlikely to ever become hegemonic government parties displacing the main parties of the Left or the Right. The best they could hope for was either to be strong enough to enter a coalition government, and ensure its adherence to ecoological principles (thus becoming a sort of pressure group within), or to become such an electoral threat as to compel existing parties to become more environmentally aware.

The gender conflict was part of a relatively peaceful, but nevertheless momentous, social upheaval, a true revolution which forced everyone - not only socialists- to adjust. Conservatives faced a particular predicament: the traditional family they defended was being eroded by the capitalist system they staunchly upheld. The parties of the Left, traditionally committed to the emancipation of women and their integration into the labour market, were faced with a paradox of the different nature. Women were becoming ‘productive’ workers in unprecedented numbers. According to socialist ideology, this would make them more susceptible to left-wing values. However, women were not, on the whole, joining a skilled and highly unionised proletariat, but a deregulated labour market of the kind socialists had fought against for over a hundred years.

Socialists had run out of ideas. In the 1960s they had abandoned the aim of abolishing capitalism; in the 1970s and 1980s they proclaimed that they were the ideal managers of it. By 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed, the conventional reformist idea that it was necessary to possess a large public sector to countervail the negative tendencies of the private sector had evaporated from the programmes of all socialist parties. The privatisation of the public sector, previously unthinkable even among most conservatives, came to be accepted by many socialists.

Unemployment is the single most important factor in the decline in trade union strength. Social democracy is unsustainable in a situation of high unemployment. By 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, it had become generally accepted that the struggled against inflation was the fundamental task of governments, while that against unemployment was hopeless or secondary. This was the clearest indication of the ideological victory of the forces of conservatism

When this model of capitalism entered into crisis, so did the concomitant model of social-democratic politics. A new political conflict ensued between social democrats and conservatives. The previous combat between the two - in the 1950s and 1960s - had centred round the distribution of the surplus. In the 1970s and 1980s, the new ‘positional warfare’ - to use Gramsci’s expression - was over the role of the state in the reorganisation of capitalist relations. The Left tried to expand the prevailing regulatory regime even further. The Right advocated a substantial retrenchment of the state and the liberalisation of a market expanded by privatisation.

In a libertarian utopia an employer would be free to implement their own version of the Northern Territory Intervention. As the only private sector employer in a remote Indigenous community, they might choose to pay their workers using a Basics Card that can only be used at a company store. Naturally the store would stock only healthy products like fresh fruit and vegetables. The employer might also regularly test workers for drugs and alcohol — not in order to prevent accidents at work — but in order to encourage workers to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

According to Friedrich Hayek’s definition, this would be coercion. In the Constitution of Liberty he defined coercion as “such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another.”

Libertarians object to coercion by governments. They strenuously object to coercion when it’s directed against employers or corporations trying to sell things like cigarettes, alcohol and junk food. But they don’t object to coercion when it’s part of the labour contract.

So it turns out libertarians don’t have a principled objection to nannying. In some cases, they’re all for it.

In challenging the alleged moral strictness of the establishment of the older generation, the young activists were also in direct confrontation with the puritanical values enshrined in much working-class respectability, and to which the parties of the Left always paid lip-service. According to the ethos of traditional socialism, permissiveness was associated with bourgeois libertines. The dominant and dubious assumption of social-democratic and communist leaders was that their working-class supporters - had they been asked - would have expressed a strong contempt for sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

No political party of any major weight developed out of the organisational structures devised by the student activists. No established party suffered unduly, or prospered particularly, as a consequence of the movement. All attempts to construct a more or less revolutionary party in opposition to the traditional socialist or communist organisations utterly failed, and all efforts to capture these organisations and subvert them were successfully repelled. Yet some of the long-term influence of the 1960s on politics manifested itself in unlikely quarters in the 1980s and 1990d: some of the individual and anti-state rhetoric of the period was captured by a reconstructed conservatism with its emphasis on ‘getting the state of the backs of the people’ - a far more 1960s’ slogan than anything subsequently invented by parties of the Left. To some extent, May 1968 was the first step towards the dissolution of the Jacobin language of revolutionary politics which had for so long prevailed in France.