One of the rhetorical tricks in contemporary debates goes as follows: Present people who agree with you as if they were convinced of the validity of their (your) positions by reality, suggest people who disagree with you never put their nose out of their office.
I am reading a bit on “neoliberalism” (a tip: if it has neoliberalism is in the title, feel free to assume it’s a terrible book. There are exceptions, but only a handful). In particular, I am reading one of Oxford’s typically excellent very short introductions, this one written by Manfred Steiger and Ravi Roy.
They write (p.5):
The fury and longevity of the Great Depression convinced leading economic thinkers like John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi that government was much more than a mere ‘nightwatchman’.
Now, I’m no native English speaker but it seems to me that the sentence suggests that Keynes and Polanyi were full-fledged champions of laissez faire, or at least moderate supporter of the market economy, until the Great Depression “convinced” them that such quaint ideas were an unhelpful leftover for the modern world.
Was it so? Then why did Keynes published “Am I a liberal?” in 1925 and “The end of laissez faire” in 1926? Sure, Churchill returned to the gold standard in 1925, an act that Keynes considered disastrous, but was he building his own political views on the evidence of such pieces of monetary history?
Before the Great Depression, Keynes was already convinced that society should start “exercising directive intelligence through some appropriate organ of action over many of the inner intricacies of private business”. No night watchman here. As it were, the Great Depression certainly helped him to sharpen his views and deepen his analysis, but he had, like all of us, political instincts. Is that too difficult to admit?
READER COMMENTS
Hazel Meade
Jun 19 2018 at 11:17am
IIRC “neoliberal” is a word that was coined by Latin American Marxists as a pejorative against free market capitalism, which was then adopted by American left-liberals in the late 1990s. At the time “liberal” in the US generally meant socialist. Hence “neoliberal” was invented as a way of insinuating that “liberals” who moved away from democratic socialism were not really liberals – they were “neo” liberals. Or if they didn’t invent it that is how it got popularized. So whenever you see the word “neoliberal” you can be pretty sure that the person using it is coming from a leftist background.
Mark Z
Jun 20 2018 at 2:52pm
I thought I read somewhere that the term was embraced by Walter Lippmann. It was apparently coined by the French economist Louis Marlio in reference to a speech or something by Lippmann.
In any case, I always got the impression that when leftists use the term, they are/were not saying “socialists are the *real* liberals.” Rather, I thought they were referring to classical/economic liberalism, and more specifically, the resurgence of economic liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and that they are distancing themselves from the word ‘liberalism.’ It’s worth noting that there are other contexts in which people on the left use the term ‘liberal’ pejoratively, notably international relations. People on the left tend to identify with foreign policy ‘realism’, while calling liberal democratic interventionists foreign policy ‘liberals.’
In Latin America, liberalism historically meant classical liberalism, until around the 1930s or 1940s I think, when Liberal parties began to turn heavily toward socialism. So, if anything, perhaps Thatcher and Reagan et al. ought to have been called ‘paleoliberals.’
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