On Neoliberalism. Again.
I’m a bit late to this article, but back in July, the Cornell historian Larry Glickman offered a fascinating periodization of the term of “neoliberalism.”
Initially, Glickman argues, in the 1930s, the word was a term of abuse wielded by conservative free marketeers against New Deal liberals. The free markeeters accused the New Deal liberals of betraying the real meaning of the term “liberal” by embracing the state, constraining the market, and so on. So, said these free marketeers, the New Dealers were “neoliberal” while they, the free marketeers, were the true liberals.
Phase 2, we move to Europe and the Mont Pelerin Society, where the term takes on a positive meaning among free market intellectuals like Hayek and, for a time, back in the US, Milton Friedman. That proves to be short-lived, as Friedman ultimately opts for other words to describe the formation.
Phase 3, we’re in the late 1970s and 1980s, and Charles Peters and his little merry band of techno dudes embrace the term as a way of reforming (or gutting, take your pick) New Deal liberalism. They call themselves neoliberals. Also proves to be short-lived. (I wrote about them back in April.)
Phase 4 is where we are today: with the term largely used by the left as a term of art or criticism against, well, the shit around us.
All-around, Glickman’s is a very useful, Daniel Rodgers-style, account of the shifting meaning of the term.
Also, though this wasn’t Larry’s point, it occurred to me that the free marketeers sort of had a legitimate beef in the 1930s.
I mean, think about it this way. The term liberal—though ahistorical people like to use it as an epithet or approbation for everyone from John Locke to Hillary Clinton—didn’t come into political usage until the 19th century, where it was often associated with the cultivation of trade and markets. These liberal arguments about the market and commerce were complicated—often quite different from the simplistic, pro-market arguments you hear today, in so many ways—but from the sheer standpoint of historical experience and memory: you can imagine why it would have seemed like a shock to free market folks in the 1930s to hear this term, which had for its relatively short life span (and with the possible exception of the New Liberals in the late 19th and early 20th century Britain) been associated with a positive embrace of markets and commerce and the like, suddenly come to be associated with the state’s assault on those markets. I can see why that would have been a source of some consternation.