Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan
By Taylor C. Boas, J. Gans-Morse. 2009
527 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In recent years, neoliberalism has become an academic catchphrase. Yet, in contrast to other prominent social science concepts such as democracy, the meaning and proper usage of neoliberalism curiously have elicited little scholarly debate. Based on a content analysis of 148 journal articles published from 1990 to 2004, we document three potentially problematic aspects of neoliberalism’s use: the term is often undefined; it is employed unevenly across ideological divides; and it is used to characterize an excessively broad variety of phenomena. To explain these characteristics, we trace the genesis and evolution of the term neoliberalism throughout several decades of political economy debates. We show that neoliberalism has undergone a striking transformation, from a positive label coined by the German Freiberg School to denote a moderate renovation of classical liberalism, to a normatively negative term associated with radical economic reforms in Pinochet’s Chile. We then present an extension of W. B. Gallie’s framework for analyzing essentially contested concepts to explain why the meaning of neoliberalism is so rarely debated, in contrast to other normatively and politically charged social science terms. We conclude by proposing several ways that the term can regain substantive meaning as a “new liberalism” and be transformed into a more useful analytic tool.
Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91bca7f2a847e259d03cca6b45c8062c98dc6016
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Finance
In Political Science and International Relations
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The Handbook of Neoliberalism (2016, unknown): “liberalization, privatization, marketization) (Boas and Gans-Morse 2009).”
- Neoliberalism as concept (2015, background): “…studies, neoliberalism was routinely found to be left undefined even when it is a key dependent or independent variable in empirical research (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009).2 What these critiques point to more broadly is that neoliberalism, which is often used to explain, critique and challenge,…”