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.

Stuart Hall, however, argued that if Thatcherism had become a 'living thought', its vitality was not due to its vision of an alternative utopia, but a determination to mobilise the lived experience of the state by 'working people'. By picking away at the internal contraindications of the socialist defence of the welfare state, socialism could be represented, through the stresses and indignities of a life administered by bureaucracy, “not as a benefice but as a powerful bureaucratic burden on 'the people'... less as a welfare or redistributive agency, and more as the 'state of monopoly capital''.[2]

Seen from a certain perspective, these early critiques of the first wave of neoliberalism have roots in Van Eyck's counsel of despair. If the scale of the urban question dissolved the confidence of architects to design utopia, then what neoliberalism offered was an explanation; the failure of architectural modernity was rooted in a pathology internal to the socialist desire to plan every facet of everyday life. To put the matter bluntly, why bother inventing an alternative society, when you could put 'utopia on trial' and present the market as the only possible solution to every possible social question?

By the late eighties, recognising that the market was being totalised under the auspices of 'human capital theory' into a 'unified framework for the [economic] understanding of all human behaviour',[3] Jameson argued that what was needed was a revivification of ideological analysis. The value of the spatial dialectic was that it tracked the underlying process through which transformations in political ideology were conditioned by changes in the investment of capital in the use and exchange, design and reformatting of built environments.

For Jameson what this offered was a means to refresh the critique of ideology proposed by Lefebvre's intellectual foil, Louis Althusser. If, as Althusser argued, ideology represents 'the Imaginary representation of the Subject's relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence', then a critique of spatial cognition – a critique of 'the internalized reflection and reconstruction of space in thought'[4] – provided an approach to map the spatial practices that enable capitalism to persistently privilege the individual subject (whether that be the individual self, family, company, city or nation state) at the expense of the social world. Moreover, the critique of spatial ideology indicated something else. If one treated Van Eyck's claim of defeat as the symptom of a wider restructuring of the space of capital, then it tracked a spectre moving in the urban ruins of the modernist project.