Neoliberalism

Central banks, on this view, should chase explicit inflation targets through independent technocratic judgment with minimal political interference. The unconventional-policy years after 2008 stretched that framework hard, and the tradition now splits over whether to snap back to pre-2008 orthodoxy or concede the framework needs rebuilding.

Open trade and global integration read as positive-sum here, paired with targeted help for workers the trade displaces. The protectionist turn after 2016 dealt the position a serious defeat, and the open question is whether the argument can be remade or whether the record demands something deeper.

Before 2008 the line was that markets self-correct and that regulatory restraint rewards innovation. The crisis discredited it badly. Mainstream neoliberalism has since made its peace with the post-crisis regulatory expansion (Dodd-Frank in the US, parallel reforms in Europe), though the libertarian wing has not.

Wherever it can, the tradition routes social services through markets: the ACA exchanges in US healthcare, defined-contribution pensions, means-tested welfare. Results have been uneven, and the position has bled support to single-payer alternatives on the left and to status-quo defenders on the right at the same time.

The Chicago-school antitrust line (focus on consumer welfare, treat structural concentration as legitimate so long as prices stay stable) draws more fire every year. The contemporary Neoliberal Project now pushes a tougher antitrust stance that orthodox neoliberalism would have waved off.

Neoliberalism is the policy framework that ran the global economy from roughly 1980 to 2008: tight monetary policy, financial deregulation, tax reduction, privatization of state enterprises, trade liberalization, and weakened labor bargaining. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947, gathered the founding figures (Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper). Thatcher and Reagan implemented the package politically; the IMF and World Bank carried it globally. The 2008 financial crisis ended its political dominance, but most OECD economic institutions still operate on its premises.

Someone who treats market-mediated coordination as the default and state action as something that needs to justify itself in specific cases. The contemporary American center-left version (Lawrence Summers, Brad DeLong) accepts meaningful social insurance and post-2008 financial regulation while keeping faith with free trade and central-bank independence. The European version, anchored in the ECB and the Maastricht framework, is more orthodox on monetary discipline. The libertarian-adjacent Cato wing is closer to the founding generation's anti-state instincts.

Literally, new liberal, marking the 1930s and 1940s founders as updating classical liberalism for mass democracy and industrial society. In contemporary usage the word has split: people inside the tradition use it descriptively for the post-1947 Mont Pelerin program; people outside it use it pejoratively for the policy package they blame for inequality, the 2008 crash, and the populist backlash. David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) is the influential left-academic account that fixed the critical usage.

Intellectually in 1947, when Hayek convened the Mont Pelerin Society. Politically in 1973, when the Pinochet government in Chile implemented Chicago-trained economists' program at brutal pace. As mainstream policy in 1979 with Margaret Thatcher in Britain and 1981 with Ronald Reagan in the US. As global default in the 1990s, when post-Soviet transition economies, the Maastricht-era EU, and the Clinton-Blair third-way governments converged on the framework. The 2008 financial crisis is usually treated as the end of its undisputed dominance.

Operationally yes, even if he would not have used the word. The Reagan administration implemented the canonical neoliberal package: tax cuts, financial deregulation, weakened labor bargaining (the 1981 PATCO strike is the symbolic moment), monetary discipline under Paul Volcker, and trade liberalization. The cultural conservatism Reagan attached to it was not part of the Mont Pelerin program, which is why the post-2016 Republican populists were able to keep the social politics and drop the economic neoliberalism cleanly.

Economically it has been the working program of the post-1980 American and British right, but philosophically it sits closer to classical liberalism than to traditional conservatism. Neoliberals are generally permissive on social and cultural questions (Friedman supported drug legalization, marriage between consenting adults was not their fight), pro-immigration on economic grounds, and skeptical of religious authority over policy. The Reagan-Thatcher coalition welded neoliberal economics to conservative cultural commitments for a generation; the post-2016 populist turn separated the two threads.

Politically it has been weakened; institutionally it is still running. The 2008 crisis discredited the financial-deregulation wing, the post-2016 populist surges (Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Milei) have rejected the trade wing, and the post-2021 inflation has stretched the monetary-policy framework hard. But the IMF, the ECB, the Fed, the OECD, the WTO, and most national central banks still operate on neoliberal premises. The result is a tradition more powerful than popular, which is an unusual place for any ideology to live.

Classical liberalism is the older tradition (Locke, Smith, Mill, nineteenth-century), built around individual rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economics in an era of small states. Neoliberalism is the twentieth-century updating that accepts mass democracy and industrial society as the operating environment, and asks how market institutions can be designed and defended inside them. The founders, especially Hayek and Mises, explicitly distinguished themselves from the classical-liberal tradition they thought had become politically naive.