the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.' He called this awareness of 'the Unknowable' and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a positive faith which could substitute for conventional religion. Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last anthropomorphic vestiges. Political views Spencerian views in 21st-century circulation derive from his political theories and memorable attacks on the reform movements of the late 19th century. He has been claimed as a precursor by right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard called Social Statics "the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written." Spencer argued that the state was not an "essential" institution and that it would "decay" as voluntary market organisation would replace the coercive aspects of the state. He also argued that the individual had a "right to ignore the state." As a result of this perspective, Spencer was harshly critical of patriotism. In response to being told that British troops were in danger during the Second Afghan War (1878-1880) he replied: "When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves." Politics in late Victorian Britain moved in directions that Spencer disliked, and his arguments provided so much ammunition for conservatives and individualists in Europe and America that they are still in use in the 21st century. The expression "There is no alternative" (TINA), made famous by prime minister Margaret Thatcher, may be traced to its emphatic use by Spencer. By the 1880s, he was denouncing "the new Toryism", that is, the "social reformist wing" of the Liberal Party, the wing to some extent hostile to prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, this faction of the Liberal Party Spencer compared to the interventionist "Toryism" of such people as the former Conservative Party prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. In The Man Versus the State (1884), he attacked Gladstone and the Liberal Party for losing its proper mission (they should be defending personal liberty, he said) and instead promoting paternalist social legislation (what Gladstone himself called "Construction", an element in the modern Liberal party that he opposed). Spencer denounced Irish land reform, compulsory education, laws to regulate safety at work, prohibition and temperance laws, tax funded libraries, and welfare reforms. His main objections