Comments on: The spectre of “neoliberalism”

By: Tom Papworth

Tom Papworth — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:22:11 +0000

Interestingly, the New Liberalism was the term given to the interventionist, Liberal Socialism preached by Hobhouse and practiced by Lloyd George – a parallel of your German example.

I’ve noted before that, to my mind, Neo-Liberals believe in state intervention in (for example) competition policy and – crucially – the money supply. Friedman and the monetarists are Neo-Liberals whereas Hayek and the whigs were Classical Liberals.

Naiomi Klein, by comparison, is a Socialist. She therefore probably thinks that she should be called a “Liberal” (no qualification). She is wrong.

By: Tom Papworth

Tom Papworth — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:19:47 +0000

“Naomi Klein’s wide definition doesn’t leave us any wiser.”

To be fair, I don’t think that Naomi Klein has ever left anybody any the wiser!

Yes, Friedman called himself (accurately) a liberal, and many of his adherents (sometimes also accurately) called themselves conservative. The American bastardisation of the term “liberal” has been the subject of litres of (virtual) ink, and is a problem old enough that Mises was obliged to subtitle his book on the subject Liberalism in the Classical tradition.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:02:31 +0000

One of the really ironic things at present is the number of books written by left-wing academics foretelling the collapse of capitalism – search for books on capitalism by publication date on Amazon and you come up with lots of works due for publication next year. The irony, of course, is that it is an area that publishers think will be rather profitable. There is clearly a market for books on the end of the market!

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:15:26 +0000

Richard, I was at a seminar last week with someone who proclaimed himself to be a post-marxist social constructionist. Being post-marxist apparently doesn’t mean he rejects Marx, but thinks that he’ll steal the ‘good’ bits and leave all the bits about historical inevitability. I find one way to annoy people on the left is to use the blanket term ‘Trot’ to describe them all.

By: Richard Wellings

Richard Wellings — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:58:12 +0000

I wonder whether classical liberals are similarly guilty of submerging the nuances of socialist thinking under catch-all labels. There are significant differences between, say, Leninists and Trotskyites, but how many of us have taken the time to examine these perspectives in detail?

By: Philip

Philip — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:43:22 +0000

Good post which raises a number of issues. Assuming Klein’s comments are in context, she obviously finds nuances difficult. One reason why labels change is because socialists “steal” them from us. Another reason is because different people do actually think differently (a concept that a socialist might find difficult to handle). Of course, a liberal believes that people should be free – including being free to reject all commercial relationships in favour of subsistence. And there will be differences as to how freedom should be limited by government for very particular reasons. More importantly, of course, the neo-liberalism that is held to have (for example) caused the crash is an invention.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:31:02 +0000

One particularly absurd definition I read once claimed that neo-liberalism was a form of neo-conservatism. It didn’t seem to occur to the writer that neo-conservatives might not feel the need to use an alternative label. The really interesting thing about the term ‘neo-liberal’ however is that it also used by others as a mode of criticism, but never as something anyone described themselves as. It is really just a lazy catch-all for people like Klein who find thinking difficult.