It's the End of the Neoliberal Era, and We Still Don't Know What Neoliberalism IsPolitics is filled with words that mean different things in different mouths, but "neoliberalism" is an especially tangled case.
By Jesse Walker
From the March 2022 issue
It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that no one knows what the hell neoliberal means. Plenty of people are quite sure they know what it means. It's just that they can't agree on a common definition.
Consider two articles published in two different left-wing magazines. The first, written by Megan Erickson for Jacobin, is a critique of "unschooling," an informal, self-directed, countercultural sort of homeschooling that dispenses with tests, lectures, and predetermined curricula. The movement is beloved by many anti-corporate leftists, but Erickson warns them that its "values of freedom, autonomy, and choice are in perfect accordance with market-based 'reforms,' and with the neoliberal vision of society on which they're based."
The other story, published by Dave Zirin in The Nation, denounces the Brazilian authorities for pouring public money into stadiums for the World Cup and the Olympics. Such subsidies are "neoliberal plunder," Zirin declares, because "neoliberalism, at its core, is about transferring wealth out of the public social safety net and into the hands of private capital."
So unschooling is neoliberal even when it is explicitly anti-corporate, because it resembles an idealized free market. And stadium subsidies are neoliberal because they rain wealth on corporations, even if they override market principles in the process. What a capacious word this is.
Now, politics is filled with words that mean different things in different mouths. The world has never come to a complete consensus on the meaning of capitalism, socialism, conservatism, or just plain liberalism, without the neo attached. But neoliberalism is an especially tangled case. It has two entirely separate etymologies, one of which essentially reversed the term's meaning midway through its evolution. On top of that, the word became a popular epithet at a time when hardly any people were using it to describe themselves—that is, at a time when there wasn't much of a constituency for keeping a stable definition in place. It's a bit easier to find self-proclaimed neoliberals today, but they arrived so late that they may have muddied the waters even more.
For all that, there arguably is a coherent way to use the term. But first we need to cut through that historical tangle.
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Most histories of the word neoliberal start in Germany between the world wars, with a group of intellectuals who today are usually called the ordoliberals. At the time they often called themselves neoliberals, because they were trying to develop a new alternative to the old laissez faire liberalism of the 19th century. At one famous gathering—the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, held in Paris in 1938—they mixed with, and sometimes clashed with, several prominent laissez faire liberals of the day, including Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.
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"The German neoliberals accepted the classical liberal notion that competition among free individuals drives economic prosperity," Boas and Gans-Morse explain. But they "sought to divorce liberalism—the freedom of individuals to compete in the marketplace—from laissez faire—freedom from state intervention." The ordoliberals were a strong influence on West Germany's postwar "social market economy," in which officials abolished food rationing, swept away price controls, lowered taxes and trade barriers, and contracted the money supply, but also embraced interventions intended to foster competition and ensure a safety net.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/02/19/neoliberalism-we-hardly-knew-ye/
