The Adventures of “Neoliberalism”

Abstract

The paper examines the genealogy and metamorphosis of the term “neoliberalism” as one of the most fashionable and widespread concepts, actively used today in wide array of social disciplines from sociology, history, and geography to anthropology and gender studies. Neoliberalism is regarded by its critics as the most successful ideology in the whole history. It is argued to constitute the meaning and essence of the modern era and to be the cause of all the problems of today’s world — inequality, poverty, climate change, globalization, financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, etc. The first part analyzes the unique features of this concept: the absence of real “neoliberals,” pejorativeness, ideological asymmetry (existence only in the lexicon of leftist theorists), semantic emptiness, vastness. The second part examines five different historical incarnations of neoliberalism, from the original one, which emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the contemporary one. Neoliberalism 1 was born in Austria in the 1920s due to efforts of Marxist and protonazi authors. Neoliberalism 2 originated from the famous economist and sociologist Alexander Rüstow, a member of the German Ordoliberal circle. Neoliberalism 3 appeared in Latin America in the 1970s, when leftist intellectuals began to label in such a way the economic reforms in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Neoliberalism 4 was the intellectual brainchild of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who chose the term as the generic term for all schools of “economic” liberalism. Finally, modern Neoliberalism 5 emerged as a hybrid of Neoliberalism 3 and Neoliberalism 4. In the course of these metamorphoses, “neoliberalism” has changed its meaning and evaluative character more than once. The author concludes that “neoliberalism” is a key element in the worldview of contemporary leftist intellectuals, where it takes the form of a faceless metaphysical evil that spreads its wings over all mankind and leads it from one disaster to another.