MARKETS AND RELIGION: IS 1979 THE YEAR THE WORLD BEGAN TO CHANGE

Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("Surely, Britain's first female prime minister has nothing in common with Iranian Shiism's leading militant cleric. And what could possibly unite the bishop of Rome, the budding Islamists of Afghanistan, and the leader of the Chinese Communist Party? The fact that they lived through the same historical inflection point, one might argue, does not mean that their stories are linked. Coincidence is not correlation." "In fact, though, they have much more in common than at first meets the eye. The forces unleashed in 1979 marked the beginning of the end of the great socialist utopia that had dominated so much of the twentieth century. These five stories00the Iranian Revolution, the start of the Afghan jihad, Thatcher;s election victory, the pope;s first Polish pilgrimage, and the launch of China;s economic reforms--defected the course of history in a radically new direction, It was in 1979 that the twin forces of markets and religion, discounted for so long, came back with a vengeance." Id. at xiii. Though Caryl does not make this point, if 1979 is the birth of the twenty-first century, then perhaps 1979, not September 11, 2001, marks the beginning of the end of the American Century.).