# Neoliberalism **Neoliberalism** is the policy-and-intellectual regime that took the [[Austrian School]] and [[Chicago School]] economic frameworks and operationalized them as the dominant approach to economic policy across much of the world from roughly the late 1970s to the late 2010s. Its core commitments are deregulation, privatization of public assets and services, free trade and capital mobility, central-bank independence focused on inflation control, fiscal discipline (debt reduction prioritized over public spending), low taxes on capital and high incomes, the weakening of organized labor, and — most distinctively — the extension of market logic into domains previously governed by other principles, including education, healthcare, prisons, water, and public utilities. What separates neoliberalism from classical nineteenth-century *laissez-faire* is that it does not call for a weak or absent state. It calls for a strong state actively repurposed to construct, defend, and extend markets — enforcing contracts and property rights, disciplining labor, bailing out the financial system, and insulating economic governance (especially monetary policy) from democratic majorities. This is why critics describe it less as "free markets" than as a deliberate political project to place economic questions beyond the reach of ordinary politics. ## Intellectual lineage The genealogy runs from the 1938 [[Walter Lippmann]] Colloquium in Paris — which first gathered the thinkers who would oppose both socialism and unreconstructed *laissez-faire* — through [[Friedrich Hayek]]'s founding of the [[Mont Pelerin Society]] in 1947. The MPS became the organizing node of a transnational network, seeding and linking the think tanks that would later carry the ideas into government: the Institute of Economic Affairs in Britain, and in the United States the [[Heritage Foundation]], the [[Cato Institute]], and the [[American Enterprise Institute]], later coordinated internationally through the [[Atlas Network]]. Two wings coexist uneasily within the tradition. The Anglo-American MPS wing — [[Friedrich Hayek]], [[Milton Friedman]], [[Ludwig von Mises]], [[James M. Buchanan]] — emphasized market freedom, monetarism, and public-choice skepticism of government. The German *ordoliberal* wing (Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Eucken, Alexander Rüstow) emphasized a strong legal-constitutional order to keep markets competitive, a strand that later shaped the European Union's economic architecture. The historian [[Quinn Slobodian]], in *Globalists* (2018), reframes the whole project as fundamentally concerned with *encasing* markets in supranational institutions to protect them from national democracy. ## Political deployment Neoliberalism's first national implementation was not in a democracy but in [[Augusto Pinochet]]'s Chile, where U.S.-trained "Chicago Boys" economists restructured the economy after the 1973 coup — a sequence Hayek notably defended. Its democratic breakthrough came with the [[Margaret Thatcher]] and [[Ronald Reagan]] governments of 1979–1989: deregulation, privatization, union-breaking (the U.S. air traffic controllers and the British miners), capital-gains and top-rate tax cuts, and monetarist inflation control. From 1989 onward the framework was globalized as the **Washington Consensus** — the package of liberalization, privatization, and austerity conditions the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury imposed on developing and post-Soviet economies. In the United States the regime became bipartisan: the deregulatory and free-trade core was carried forward by the Clinton administration (NAFTA, welfare reform, financial deregulation) as much as by Republicans, which is precisely why later right-wing populists could attack it as the ideology of a unified "uniparty" establishment. ## The break and its afterlife The 2008 financial crisis shattered neoliberalism's intellectual hegemony — the self-correcting-markets premise was falsified in public — but did not replace it as a policy regime; the bailouts, in fact, exemplified the "socialism for the rich" critique. The post-2010 authoritarian-populist wave (Brexit, Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro) can be read, following [[Karl Polanyi]]'s 1944 argument in *[[The Great Transformation]]*, as the predicted social "counter-movement" against the dislocations of market society. The contemporary American right has an unresolved relationship to neoliberalism: the donor-and-think-tank infrastructure remains thoroughly neoliberal, while the populist base and a "New Right" intellectual faction (industrial policy, tariffs, anti–Big Tech antitrust) explicitly reject it. Whether [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] is the right's governing creed or merely a fundraising convenience is one of the central tensions this knowledge base tracks. ## See Also - [[Free Market Fundamentalism]] — the quasi-religious popular form of the same creed - [[Friedrich Hayek]] — founding intellectual architect - [[Milton Friedman]] — popularizer and Chicago-school operationalizer - [[Mont Pelerin Society]] — the organizing institution - [[The Road to Serfdom]] — founding text - [[The Great Transformation]] — the canonical counter-argument - [[Karl Polanyi]] — the foundational critic - [[Quinn Slobodian]] — historian of the encasement thesis