Saturday, March 17, 2007
Neoliberalism
Maybe that's neo-neoliberalism.
The word "neoliberalism," at least in its domestic context, was coined by The Washington Monthly's Charles Peters in 1978. (It didn't start, as David Brooks declared, with a Kinsley tax editorial [4 pp. pdf] in 1981).
--Mickey Kaus (March 12, 2007 4:48 P.M.)
Maybe that's neo-neoliberalism.
In March 1946, with a number of distinguished associates, Leonard E. Read established the Read Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. ...
The principal function which the Foundation for Economic Education served in those years, in short, was to facilitate the recovery of a tradition and the dissemination of ideas. ...
The Foundation for Economic Education in these years was extending its version of classical liberalism from the few to the many, one by one.
As FEE went about its work, another organization founded in 1947 thousands of miles away was also contributing substantially to the growing self-consciousness and interrelatedness of what some were calling the neo-liberal movement in the United States and Western Europe. The earliest stimulus for this aspect of the revival emanated from the United States in 1937, when Walter Lippmann published The Good Society. Among those quick to perceive its importance was Friedrich Hayek, who considered it a "brilliant restatement of the fundamental ideals of classic liberalism." [Hayek, Studies p. 199n]
--George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (1976) pp. 24-25
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¶ 3/17/2007 10:54:00 AM
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A pet peeve I have: when people (usually outside the US) use the term "neo-liberalism" just as a sort of pejorative synonym of "capitalism," when to me as a liberal, the point of any kind of "liberalism" whether "neo-" or otherwise, is that there are rights against the state, that the individual is an important unit of analysis on his/her own (and not just as part of some sort of collectivity), etc. ..That's not to disagree with anything in the passages you quote. My point is just that even Hayekian liberalism (i.e., not only the liberalism of Mill and Locke) is about more than just economic arrangements. The use within the US of "liberal" to refer to certain Left-of-center views is annoying, but if I have to choose I'll take _that_ any day over the sort of materialist reductionism (still common in lots of places abroad) that sees liberalism as nothing other than a bourgeois smokescreen that provides cover for economic injustice.
Thanks for citing my piece on Burke in your post on him, by the way!
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Thanks for citing my piece on Burke in your post on him, by the way!
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