thought out of its complacent ruts and tend to mark periods of lush proliferation of theoretical and empirical innovation. I would like to explore the possibility that we might approach the concept “neoliberalism” with the same appreciation. In order to accomplish this, a certain modicum of intellectual history is indispensable.
We elect to start with the manifest phenomenon that most people whom outsiders would identify as neoliberals would reject the label outright, and indeed, deny the position exists as a coherent doctrine. For them, it is just another swearword bandied about by their opponents, rather like “fascism” or “equality.” Some go further, adopting the nominalist position that if “we” refuse to call ourselves neoliberal, then no one else has the right to do so, either. More recently, one can find certain authors on the left advocating that the doctrine is so ephemeral and diffuse that it displays insufficient quiddity for analysis.
The nominalist position can be rapidly dispensed with. As my collaborators and I have insisted elsewhere, the people associated with the doctrine did call themselves “neo-liberals” for a brief period lasting from the 1930s to the early 1950s, but then they abruptly stopped the practice.26 In the early phases, various figures such as Alexander Rüstow vied for bragging rights in coining the term.27 Others simply acknowledged its currency. To give one pertinent example from many, Milton Friedman wrote in the Norwegian journal Farmand in 1951:
A new ideology . . . must give high priority to real and efficient limitation of the state’s ability to, in detail, intervene in the activities of the individual. At the same time, it is absolutely clear that there are positive functions allotted the state. The doctrine that, on and off, has been called neoliberalism and that has developed, more or less simultaneously in many parts of the world . . . is precisely such a doctrine . . . But instead of the 19th century understanding that laissez-faire is the means to achieve this goal, neoliberalism proposes that competition will lead the way.28
Friedman was still flirting with something like the label as late as 1961, in an early draft of what later became Capitalism and Freedom:
This use of the term liberalism in these two quite different senses renders it difficult to have a convenient label for the principles I shall be talking about. I shall resolve these difficulties by using the word liberalism in its original sense. Liberalism of what I have called the 20th century variety has by now become orthodox and indeed reactionary. Consequently, the views I shall present might equally be entitled, under current conditions, the “new liberalism,” a more attractive designation than “nineteenth century liberalism.”
In another historical phenomenon that I feel has not received sufficient attention, soon after many of the neoliberals renounced the label, opponents to their right began to resort to it in order to be provocative. Murray Rothbard, from a more libertarian perspective, began to excoriate Friedman for his position. Later classical liberals, dissatisfied specifically with the evolution of the Mont Pèlerin Society, would resort to the term to contrast the position of Ludwig von Mises with what they considered the debased version found in Friedrich Hayek and elsewhere.29 The question of why the target group in and around Mont Pèlerin invoked a self-denying ordinance in using the label is interesting in its own right, and we will return to it in the next section. But for the nonce, I trust everyone can accept that the nominalist position is flawed: the term was and sometimes still is used in a sensible way on both the left and right, and moreover, the roster of people and institutions referenced is fairly stable over time: members of the Mont Pèlerin Society and their close associates. To a first approximation, the MPS will serve as our Rosetta Stone: any idea or person with membership or strong ties to the organization will qualify as “neoliberal.” With further research, we can expand the purview to encompass outer orbits of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
Anyone who has made a study of politics realizes that the conventional left-right continuum needs to be splintered into numerous subsets and offshoots in order to make any intellectual sense of the cacophony of argumentation to be found therein. This admonition needs repetition in the current context, because of the ubiquitous confusion over the referent and meaning of the term “liberal” in America, even at this late date. Every historian of the New Right in America acknowledges that it is a fractious coalition of groups who may not share much in the way of doctrinal overlap: classical liberals, cultural conservatives, theocons, libertarians, old-school anticommunists, anarchists, classical Burkean traditionalists, ultranationalist neoconservatives, strict construction federalists, survivalist militias, and so forth. A standard narrative of historians of the modern right is that a number of these different factions declared a tentative truce from the 1970s onward under the rubric of “fusionism,” and that this détente was a major factor in their resurgence from a low point after the Great Depression.30 Rather than plow old furrows, we shall provisionally accept this basic account for our own purposes, primarily to insist that “neoliberals” should be approached as one individual subset of this phalanx. Hence we seek to characterize a relatively discrete subset of right-wing thought situated within a much larger universe, although it does tend to stand out as the faction most concerned to integrate economic theory with political doctrine. For that reason alone, it is directly germane to a wider purview of the economic crisis.
Much pandemonium concerning the existence of neoliberalism derives from the fact that outsiders often confuse it with libertarianism or classical liberalism; and this, in turn, is at least partly due to the fact that many key neoliberal figures themselves often conflated one or another alternative position with their own. For instance, Friedrich Hayek notoriously pioneered the notion that his own ideas could be traced in a direct line back to classical liberals such as David Hume and Adam Smith.31 Combined with his statement concerning Mont Pèlerin, “I personally do not intend that any public manifesto should be issued,”32 we can begin to detect a concerted policy to blur the boundaries between factions, itself part of the larger move to impose détente. This becomes more obvious in instances when we witness someone like Milton Friedman interacting with other factions on the right:
REASON In seeing yourself harkening back to 19th-century liberalism, you never became a system-builder like Rand or Rothbard . . .
FRIEDMAN Exactly. I’d rather use the term liberal than libertarian.
REASON I see you occasionally use the word libertarian.
FRIEDMAN Oh, I do.
REASON As a concession to accepted usage?
FRIEDMAN That’s right. Because liberal is now so misinterpreted . . . My philosophy is clearly libertarian. However, libertarian is not a self-defining term. There are many varieties of libertarian. There’s zero-government libertarian, an anarchist. There’s a limited-government libertarianism . . . I would like to be a zero-government libertarian.
REASON Why aren’t you?
FRIEDMAN Because I don’t think it’s a feasible social structure.33
No wonder tyros and outsiders get so flummoxed, when it proves hard to get a straight answer from many neoliberals, even when you profess to be on their side. And the more you become familiar with their writings, it often only gets worse: for instance, it would be a long, thankless task to attempt to extract actual libertarian policy proposals from Friedman’s corpus—a complaint one encounters in some actual libertarian writings. They have to avert their eyes from Friedman quotes such as, “You can have a high degree of social freedom, and a high degree of economic freedom without any political freedom.”34 Strident demonization of some bugbear entity called “the government” is not at all the same as rejecting “The State” tout court.35 That is because mature neoliberalism is not at all enamored of the minimalist night-watchman state of the classical liberal tradition: its major distinguishing characteristic is instead a set of proposals and programs to infuse,
