"The American Roots of Neoliberalism"
By Daniel Stedman Jones
"The word “neoliberalism” -- the ideology of free markets, deregulation and limited government -- is easily lost in translation from the European to the American context. In part this is a reflection of the different meanings of liberalism in Europe and the United States. But it also highlights a gap in historical understanding, which is only just beginning to be filled.
In Europe (and much of the wider world), neoliberalism is often seen as an American model of unrestrained market capitalism that has wrought havoc both on the developing world through the structural adjustment policies of the “Washington Consensus” and, most recently, by causing the financial crisis that brought the world economy to its knees in 2008. In the United States, by contrast, mention of the word often raises a quizzical glance, an assumption that it has something to do with Bill Clinton’s New Democrats who claimed to reform liberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s or prompts a conversation about the rights or wrongs of the worldview of Paul Wolfowitz, the archetypal neo-conservative. Free markets are anyway viewed in the United States by advocates as being as American as apple pie and little attention is paid to the trans-Atlantic influences that have led to a distinctively neoliberal conception of free enterprise taking hold among American policymakers.
These misconceptions are unhelpful because they obscure important elements of recent transatlantic history. It is of course true that American historians, since Alan Brinkley’s famous 1994 essay, "The Problem of American Conservatism," have opened up in all sorts of fruitful directions the study of the rightward turn taken in the United States since the 1960s. But it remains a strange feature of the debate, perhaps another hangover of oft-noted American exceptionalism, that the history of the set of ideas that much of the rest of the world most associates with the American model of capitalism, neoliberalism, is only imperfectly understood in the United States itself. In my book, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, recently published by Princeton University Press, I trace the history of neoliberalism, which I argue obtained a distinctively American inflection in the postwar period.
Neoliberalism first emerged in the interwar period, primarily in Austria, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, among thinkers and economists, who saw a need to reform liberalism. Writers like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Raymond Aron and Jacques Rueff thought that the “nightwatchman state” of laissez faire, exemplified by nineteenth century Britain, had proved inadequate for the problems of the early twentieth century. They saw a threat to individual freedom in the defeat of liberal politics by the totalitarianism of fascism and communism. Neoliberals also saw the activist and interventionist liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, along with that of the British Liberal governments of Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George, as a perversion of liberalism."
http://hnn.us/articles/american-roots-neoliberalism
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