The Strange, Transatlantic Career of "Neoliberalism"*

In 1956, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in many ways the leading theorist of Cold War liberalism, published an essay entitled "Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans" in Perspectives USA, one of the many Cold War-era publications that sought to enhance the reputation of American thought and culture on the other side of the Atlantic.**  The essay is a kind of thumbnail history and celebration of American liberalism. And Schlesinger emphasizes a point that was essential for a European understanding of American liberalism:

Enough should have been said by now to indicate that liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain. Liberalism in America has been a party of social progress rather than of intellectual doctrine, committed to ends rather than to methods. When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all -- as it did in the time of Jefferson -- liberals believed, in the Jeffersonian phrase, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state.

Indeed, for most of the period since the New Deal, the notion that "liberalism" has a fundamentally different meaning on the two sides of the Atlantic has been something of a commonplace. With the partial exception of the British "New Liberal" tradition associated with thinkers like T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, and J.A. Hobson, European liberalism has tended to stick closer to the model of the "Classical Liberals," emphasizing laissez faire economics and often deprecating the kind of activist government that has characterized American liberalism since the 1930s.  Self-described European liberals have thus tended to be  politically closer to American conservatives.

But in recent years, there's been an odd terminological and philosophical confluence of U.S. and European usages that has centered around the term "neoliberalism."  Though the word "neoliberalism" had separate U.S. and European births (corresponding, in each case, to a reimagining of each side's notion of "liberalism") there has been a remarkable convergence of these two "neoliberalisms," such that, while 20th-century discussions of "liberalism" on the two sides of the Atlantic often concerned different things, the discussion of "neoliberalism" on both sides has come to focus on a single, global phenomenon.

Given the long and complicated history of liberalism, it's not surprising that the word "neoliberalism" has appeared at various times to designate a variety of ideas and movements, varying both in terms of the (unmodified) liberalism with which they stood in contrast and the ways in which they differed from it.  The OED lists uses of the term in English going back to the 1890s.  And in the early 20th-century the term was sometimes used, at least in the US, to describe the British figures like Hobhouse and Hobson more usually referred to as "New Liberals."

Eighties American Neoliberalism

As far as I can tell it was only in the early 1980s that a distinct tendency in American politics began to label itself "neoliberal."  In the wake of the 1980 elections which featured not only the apparent triumph of Reaganite conservatism, but--in the Kennedy-Carter primary race--the latest major battle in the ongoing intra-Democratic war over the legacy of American liberalism, a number of more conservative Democrats began to adopt the label "neoliberal" to describe their position.***  Probably the single most important articulation of this tendency was "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" (.pdf here) published in the May 1983 issue of The Washington Monthly by that journal's founding editor, Charles Peters.****  But the term was also important in the first half of the 1980s in places like the New Republic, which seemed at times to embrace the term to describe its own politics, as in the April 9, 1984 TRB column (then written, I believe, by the magazine's Editor, Michael Kinsley) entitled "Neoliberals, Paleoliberals," which declared that the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, respectively represented these two tendencies and expressed a clear preference for the former.

The New York Times, too, got in on the action.  In a May 15, 1984 article entitled "As Neoliberals Search for Closest Fit, Hart is Often Mentioned," Walter Goodman described neoliberalism as "a political spirit in search of a candidate."  In addition to the aforementioned Charles Peters and Michael Kinsley, Goodman lists Amitai Eztioni and James Fallows among the spirit's "apostles," "a small but prolific group of journalists and scholars, know what they don't like, a category that includes President Reagan and Walter F. Mondale."  During the early '80s, the Grey Lady's conservative columnist and language maven William Safire seemed particular fond of the term, writing, for example, in his July 11, 1982 "On Language" column that "the hot new word in political science is neoliberal, whose appearance was predicted in this space after the triumph of neoconservatism."

Indeed, the entire conversation about "neoliberalism" during these years seems haunted by the specter of neoconservatism. "The neoliberals stand today in somewhat the position neoconservatives occupied a decade ago," wrote Goodman in the above-mentioned May 1984 article, "Their ambition is to attain the influence in liberal politics that the neoconservatives have attained in conservative politics."

But the relationship of neoliberalism to neoconservatism was more than merely structural. It is no accident (as some of the first neocons might have put it in their Old Left salad days) that the very first figure associated with the term in the pages of TNR, in October 1981, appears to have been Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had, during the 1970s, frequently been called a neoconservative, but who had always rejected that description and who, following a long, slow rightward journey during much of the previous two decades, was then planting his flag as a major player in the Democratic opposition to (at least some of) Reaganism.*****

Some of the politics of '80s US neoliberalism resembled the very earliest stages of what Justin Vaïsse (in his book Neoconservatism: the Biography of a Movement) calls the "First Age of Neoconservatism": erstwhile leftists turned Cold War liberals who in the mid-1960s attempted to stand athwart the New Left (and later the New Politics) and yell "STOP."  If anything the '80s neoliberals had more in common with conservatives than the first-wave of the neoconservatives had had in the 1960s.   In addition to rejecting much of the legacy of the New Left, neoliberals seemed suspicious of some of the legacy of the New Deal.  Though they wanted (like the early neoconservatives, it should be said) to retain liberalism's idealism, they were critical of welfare and Social Security (at least as we knew them), and sought to distance the Democratic Party from organized labor.

"If neoconservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives," Charles Peters wrote in the opening of his 1983 "Manifesto,"

we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out.  But we no longer automatically favor  unions and big government or oppose the military and big business.  Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

After the 1984 presidential campaign, discussions of "neoliberalism" began to peter out.  Hart's association with the term--which helped buoy its usage in 1984--probably came to do more harm than good. And "liberalism," for decades one of the most powerful, positive buzzwords in American life, had become almost a pejorative in American politics by the end of the Eighties. But the ideas that were associated with neoliberalism in the early-to-mid 1980s stuck around and received new labels. And their advocates became more and more powerful within the Democratic Party.

By the time the spirit of neoliberalism achieved something of an apotheosis in the Clinton administration, the word "neoliberalism" had largely been replaced by such terms as the "Third Way" and "New Democrat." And to a great extent, these ideas are still dominant in the Democratic Party today, even as the Clinton-era labels themselves have passed.

In March 2007, David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times, entitled "The Vanishing Neoliberal," which argued that neoliberalism was dead. Charles Peters himself responded in an interview with Ezra Klein that appeared in the Washington Monthly:

I think in many, many areas, the neoliberals, in effect, won. But in some cases we won too much. For instance, the rebirth of capitalism produced such extremes that we then had to turn around and say no, that is wrong. But where we clearly haven’t won is with the government bureaucracy, the teacher’s unions. We have hardly made a dent, and they still have terribly strong power. You have to be able to fire incompetent teachers and incompetent civil servants. 

Both sides of this 2007 debate, I think, underestimated the continued power of what used to be called "neoliberalism" in the Democratic Party.  Certainly the Obama Administration has embraced the anti-teacher's union policies that pass for educational reform in the era of No Child Left Behind and Waiting for Superman.******

European-Style Neoliberalism

Meanwhile, in Europe, a conversation about an entirely different thing called "neoliberalism" was brewing. Not surprisingly, this use of the word "neoliberalism" flowed out of the more European meaning of "liberalism," roughly what we in America often call "classical liberalism," the free-market doctrines associated with Smith, Ricardo, and company.   If that's the "liberalism" in European "neoliberalism," then what accounted for its "neo"?

The early history of the term "neoliberalism" in the European sense is associated with attempts in the 1930s and 1940s by members of the Austrian School of Economics like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke,  to revive liberal economics in the European sense, i.e. laissez faire economics, in the face of the challenges posed by socialism (including social democracy) and fascism.  I say "is associated with" because, as far as I can tell, these thinkers did not always (or even usually) describe themselves as "neoliberal" (or "neo-liberal").  They certainly were aware that they were renewing what they called liberalism. But they often used more descriptive neologisms (e.g. the German Ordoliberalism) or simply stuck with "liberalism."  For example, Hayek's Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) (inefficiently available for free in .pdf form from the Mises Institute) contains numerous uses of the words "liberal" and "liberalism" and not a single use of "neo-liberal" or "neo-liberalism" (with or without the hyphen).

At any rate, accounts of neoliberalism in this sense tend to begin with the Austrian School and then cross the Atlantic to discuss the Chicago School and its many intellectual and political progeny, including, e.g., the Mont Pelerin Society and Pinochet's Chile, and ending with the so-called Washington Consensus that has guided mainstream economic thinking in the developed world for most of the last three decades.   This is the basic shape of Antina von Schnitzler's entry on "Neoliberalism" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. Vol. 5. 2nd ed.  Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p473-475), and also of David Harvey's standard A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which features on its cover pictures of Ronald Reagan, Deng Xiaoping, Augusto Pinochet, and Margaret Thatcher (see also the French image attached to this post).  Charles Peters, Gary Hart, and Michael Kinsley are nowhere in sight...nor should they be.  Simply put, "neoliberalism" in this sense is an entirely different phenomenon from "neoliberalism" in the '80s American sense.

Convergence....or Something Else?

Then why has this second sense of "neoliberalism" become so important in American political talk today?  This is an interesting question for at least two related reasons: First, the term has the rather different American history and meaning attached to it that I map out above...a history and meaning that has not been entirely forgotten as the recent David Brooks-Charles Peters debate suggests. Second, what I've been calling the European meaning of "neoliberalism" is dependent for its meaning on an entirely European use of the word "liberal," a usage that self-decribed liberals in the European sense like Hayek and Friedman fought hard for in this country in the '40s and '50s and distinctly lost.  Even the most classically liberal Republicans these days call themselves "conservative" not "liberal"  (if they feel the need to use an "l" word, it's almost always "libertarian," a term that is so popular across the U.S. right these days that it's virtually devoid of any real meaning...but that's another story).   At any rate, the Americans most associated with neoliberalism in the European sense are almost entirely figures who, in the American context, we refer to as "conservatives" not "liberals," e.g.  Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan,  

So why have Americans so easily adopted the European meaning of "neoliberalism"?  Partly it's a question of globalization. Although it has European terminological origins, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is truly global and, like the world economy itself, its center has been the United States.  At some level we should just be glad that our country, which still insists on imperial measurements, is willing to adopt the vocabulary the rest of the world uses to describe its economic thought.

And yet this is not simply a matter of strategically adopting someone else's vocabulary.  Because neoliberalism (in the "European" sense) turns out to be related to liberalism...and neoliberalism...in the American sense. We've seen that in Andrew's posts on neoliberalism and the Sixties. And we see it when we look at the economic positions of the neoliberals (in the 1980s American sense) and their successors in the Clinton and Obama administrations, which have been (often brutally) neoliberal in the "European" sense.  Somehow American neoliberalism, which grew--ideologically and terminologically--out of American liberalism, and which defined itself at least in part in opposition to Reaganism, has converged with neoliberalism in the European sense, which is exemplified by Reaganism.

Is this convergent evolution, or do we have to question the view--held not simply by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but by nearly everyone else in the middle-to-late 20th century--that "liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country"?
 _______________________________________
* This overly long post is inspired both by Tim's challenge to get us talking about liberalism in America and by Andrew's entirely appropriate, but nonetheless oddly European, use of the word "neoliberal," a usage that has started appearing in both academic and blogospheric discussions of American politics in the last several years.

** This essay was reprinted in Schlesinger's collection The Politics of Hope (Boston: Riverside Press, 1962).

*** I should note that the '80s neoliberals would probably not have described themselves as "more conservative" than the "paleoliberals" (indeed their choice of the "neoliberal" moniker was indicative of their desire to describe their relative position within the Democratic Party in other-than left-and-right terms).

**** Peters became an important spokesperson for neoliberalism in the 1980s (see, for example, this cover-story debate with "radical Democrat" Robert Kuttner in the May 1985 issue of Mother Jones) and his "Manifesto" remains a touchstone of what "neoliberalism" meant in '80s America for both conservatives and liberals today.

***** Fred Barnes, "Pat Moynihan, Neoliberal," The New Republic, October 21, 1981, pp. 15-18.

****** Nevertheless, Matthew Continetti, blogging at the neoconservative Weekly Standard last May, declared that "the neoliberal tendency is pretty much extinguished these days" in the Democratic Party.  As with so much else printed by his magazine, I suppose I'll just have to disagree.

The Strange, Transatlantic Career of "Neoliberalism"*

In 1956, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in many ways the leading theorist of Cold War liberalism, published an essay entitled "Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans" in Perspectives USA, one of the many Cold War-era publications that sought to enhance the reputation of American thought and culture on the other side of the Atlantic.**  The essay is a kind of thumbnail history and celebration of American liberalism. And Schlesinger emphasizes a point that was essential for a European understanding of American liberalism:

Enough should have been said by now to indicate that liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain. Liberalism in America has been a party of social progress rather than of intellectual doctrine, committed to ends rather than to methods. When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all -- as it did in the time of Jefferson -- liberals believed, in the Jeffersonian phrase, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state.

Indeed, for most of the period since the New Deal, the notion that "liberalism" has a fundamentally different meaning on the two sides of the Atlantic has been something of a commonplace. With the partial exception of the British "New Liberal" tradition associated with thinkers like T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, and J.A. Hobson, European liberalism has tended to stick closer to the model of the "Classical Liberals," emphasizing laissez faire economics and often deprecating the kind of activist government that has characterized American liberalism since the 1930s.  Self-described European liberals have thus tended to be  politically closer to American conservatives.

But in recent years, there's been an odd terminological and philosophical confluence of U.S. and European usages that has centered around the term "neoliberalism."  Though the word "neoliberalism" had separate U.S. and European births (corresponding, in each case, to a reimagining of each side's notion of "liberalism") there has been a remarkable convergence of these two "neoliberalisms," such that, while 20th-century discussions of "liberalism" on the two sides of the Atlantic often concerned different things, the discussion of "neoliberalism" on both sides has come to focus on a single, global phenomenon.

Given the long and complicated history of liberalism, it's not surprising that the word "neoliberalism" has appeared at various times to designate a variety of ideas and movements, varying both in terms of the (unmodified) liberalism with which they stood in contrast and the ways in which they differed from it.  The OED lists uses of the term in English going back to the 1890s.  And in the early 20th-century the term was sometimes used, at least in the US, to describe the British figures like Hobhouse and Hobson more usually referred to as "New Liberals."

Eighties American Neoliberalism

As far as I can tell it was only in the early 1980s that a distinct tendency in American politics began to label itself "neoliberal."  In the wake of the 1980 elections which featured not only the apparent triumph of Reaganite conservatism, but--in the Kennedy-Carter primary race--the latest major battle in the ongoing intra-Democratic war over the legacy of American liberalism, a number of more conservative Democrats began to adopt the label "neoliberal" to describe their position.***  Probably the single most important articulation of this tendency was "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" (.pdf here) published in the May 1983 issue of The Washington Monthly by that journal's founding editor, Charles Peters.****  But the term was also important in the first half of the 1980s in places like the New Republic, which seemed at times to embrace the term to describe its own politics, as in the April 9, 1984 TRB column (then written, I believe, by the magazine's Editor, Michael Kinsley) entitled "Neoliberals, Paleoliberals," which declared that the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, respectively represented these two tendencies and expressed a clear preference for the former.

The New York Times, too, got in on the action.  In a May 15, 1984 article entitled "As Neoliberals Search for Closest Fit, Hart is Often Mentioned," Walter Goodman described neoliberalism as "a political spirit in search of a candidate."  In addition to the aforementioned Charles Peters and Michael Kinsley, Goodman lists Amitai Eztioni and James Fallows among the spirit's "apostles," "a small but prolific group of journalists and scholars, know what they don't like, a category that includes President Reagan and Walter F. Mondale."  During the early '80s, the Grey Lady's conservative columnist and language maven William Safire seemed particular fond of the term, writing, for example, in his July 11, 1982 "On Language" column that "the hot new word in political science is neoliberal, whose appearance was predicted in this space after the triumph of neoconservatism."

Indeed, the entire conversation about "neoliberalism" during these years seems haunted by the specter of neoconservatism. "The neoliberals stand today in somewhat the position neoconservatives occupied a decade ago," wrote Goodman in the above-mentioned May 1984 article, "Their ambition is to attain the influence in liberal politics that the neoconservatives have attained in conservative politics."

But the relationship of neoliberalism to neoconservatism was more than merely structural. It is no accident (as some of the first neocons might have put it in their Old Left salad days) that the very first figure associated with the term in the pages of TNR, in October 1981, appears to have been Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had, during the 1970s, frequently been called a neoconservative, but who had always rejected that description and who, following a long, slow rightward journey during much of the previous two decades, was then planting his flag as a major player in the Democratic opposition to (at least some of) Reaganism.*****

Some of the politics of '80s US neoliberalism resembled the very earliest stages of what Justin Vaïsse (in his book Neoconservatism: the Biography of a Movement) calls the "First Age of Neoconservatism": erstwhile leftists turned Cold War liberals who in the mid-1960s attempted to stand athwart the New Left (and later the New Politics) and yell "STOP."  If anything the '80s neoliberals had more in common with conservatives than the first-wave of the neoconservatives had had in the 1960s.   In addition to rejecting much of the legacy of the New Left, neoliberals seemed suspicious of some of the legacy of the New Deal.  Though they wanted (like the early neoconservatives, it should be said) to retain liberalism's idealism, they were critical of welfare and Social Security (at least as we knew them), and sought to distance the Democratic Party from organized labor.

"If neoconservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives," Charles Peters wrote in the opening of his 1983 "Manifesto,"

we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out.  But we no longer automatically favor  unions and big government or oppose the military and big business.  Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

After the 1984 presidential campaign, discussions of "neoliberalism" began to peter out.  Hart's association with the term--which helped buoy its usage in 1984--probably came to do more harm than good. And "liberalism," for decades one of the most powerful, positive buzzwords in American life, had become almost a pejorative in American politics by the end of the Eighties. But the ideas that were associated with neoliberalism in the early-to-mid 1980s stuck around and received new labels. And their advocates became more and more powerful within the Democratic Party.

By the time the spirit of neoliberalism achieved something of an apotheosis in the Clinton administration, the word "neoliberalism" had largely been replaced by such terms as the "Third Way" and "New Democrat." And to a great extent, these ideas are still dominant in the Democratic Party today, even as the Clinton-era labels themselves have passed.

In March 2007, David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times, entitled "The Vanishing Neoliberal," which argued that neoliberalism was dead. Charles Peters himself responded in an interview with Ezra Klein that appeared in the Washington Monthly:

I think in many, many areas, the neoliberals, in effect, won. But in some cases we won too much. For instance, the rebirth of capitalism produced such extremes that we then had to turn around and say no, that is wrong. But where we clearly haven’t won is with the government bureaucracy, the teacher’s unions. We have hardly made a dent, and they still have terribly strong power. You have to be able to fire incompetent teachers and incompetent civil servants. 

Both sides of this 2007 debate, I think, underestimated the continued power of what used to be called "neoliberalism" in the Democratic Party.  Certainly the Obama Administration has embraced the anti-teacher's union policies that pass for educational reform in the era of No Child Left Behind and Waiting for Superman.******

European-Style Neoliberalism

Meanwhile, in Europe, a conversation about an entirely different thing called "neoliberalism" was brewing. Not surprisingly, this use of the word "neoliberalism" flowed out of the more European meaning of "liberalism," roughly what we in America often call "classical liberalism," the free-market doctrines associated with Smith, Ricardo, and company.   If that's the "liberalism" in European "neoliberalism," then what accounted for its "neo"?

The early history of the term "neoliberalism" in the European sense is associated with attempts in the 1930s and 1940s by members of the Austrian School of Economics like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke,  to revive liberal economics in the European sense, i.e. laissez faire economics, in the face of the challenges posed by socialism (including social democracy) and fascism.  I say "is associated with" because, as far as I can tell, these thinkers did not always (or even usually) describe themselves as "neoliberal" (or "neo-liberal").  They certainly were aware that they were renewing what they called liberalism. But they often used more descriptive neologisms (e.g. the German Ordoliberalism) or simply stuck with "liberalism."  For example, Hayek's Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) (inefficiently available for free in .pdf form from the Mises Institute) contains numerous uses of the words "liberal" and "liberalism" and not a single use of "neo-liberal" or "neo-liberalism" (with or without the hyphen).

At any rate, accounts of neoliberalism in this sense tend to begin with the Austrian School and then cross the Atlantic to discuss the Chicago School and its many intellectual and political progeny, including, e.g., the Mont Pelerin Society and Pinochet's Chile, and ending with the so-called Washington Consensus that has guided mainstream economic thinking in the developed world for most of the last three decades.   This is the basic shape of Antina von Schnitzler's entry on "Neoliberalism" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. Vol. 5. 2nd ed.  Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. p473-475), and also of David Harvey's standard A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which features on its cover pictures of Ronald Reagan, Deng Xiaoping, Augusto Pinochet, and Margaret Thatcher (see also the French image attached to this post).  Charles Peters, Gary Hart, and Michael Kinsley are nowhere in sight...nor should they be.  Simply put, "neoliberalism" in this sense is an entirely different phenomenon from "neoliberalism" in the '80s American sense.

Convergence....or Something Else?

Then why has this second sense of "neoliberalism" become so important in American political talk today?  This is an interesting question for at least two related reasons: First, the term has the rather different American history and meaning attached to it that I map out above...a history and meaning that has not been entirely forgotten as the recent David Brooks-Charles Peters debate suggests. Second, what I've been calling the European meaning of "neoliberalism" is dependent for its meaning on an entirely European use of the word "liberal," a usage that self-decribed liberals in the European sense like Hayek and Friedman fought hard for in this country in the '40s and '50s and distinctly lost.  Even the most classically liberal Republicans these days call themselves "conservative" not "liberal"  (if they feel the need to use an "l" word, it's almost always "libertarian," a term that is so popular across the U.S. right these days that it's virtually devoid of any real meaning...but that's another story).   At any rate, the Americans most associated with neoliberalism in the European sense are almost entirely figures who, in the American context, we refer to as "conservatives" not "liberals," e.g.  Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan,  

So why have Americans so easily adopted the European meaning of "neoliberalism"?  Partly it's a question of globalization. Although it has European terminological origins, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is truly global and, like the world economy itself, its center has been the United States.  At some level we should just be glad that our country, which still insists on imperial measurements, is willing to adopt the vocabulary the rest of the world uses to describe its economic thought.

And yet this is not simply a matter of strategically adopting someone else's vocabulary.  Because neoliberalism (in the "European" sense) turns out to be related to liberalism...and neoliberalism...in the American sense. We've seen that in Andrew's posts on neoliberalism and the Sixties. And we see it when we look at the economic positions of the neoliberals (in the 1980s American sense) and their successors in the Clinton and Obama administrations, which have been (often brutally) neoliberal in the "European" sense.  Somehow American neoliberalism, which grew--ideologically and terminologically--out of American liberalism, and which defined itself at least in part in opposition to Reaganism, has converged with neoliberalism in the European sense, which is exemplified by Reaganism.

Is this convergent evolution, or do we have to question the view--held not simply by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but by nearly everyone else in the middle-to-late 20th century--that "liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country"?
 _______________________________________
* This overly long post is inspired both by Tim's challenge to get us talking about liberalism in America and by Andrew's entirely appropriate, but nonetheless oddly European, use of the word "neoliberal," a usage that has started appearing in both academic and blogospheric discussions of American politics in the last several years.

** This essay was reprinted in Schlesinger's collection The Politics of Hope (Boston: Riverside Press, 1962).

*** I should note that the '80s neoliberals would probably not have described themselves as "more conservative" than the "paleoliberals" (indeed their choice of the "neoliberal" moniker was indicative of their desire to describe their relative position within the Democratic Party in other-than left-and-right terms).

**** Peters became an important spokesperson for neoliberalism in the 1980s (see, for example, this cover-story debate with "radical Democrat" Robert Kuttner in the May 1985 issue of Mother Jones) and his "Manifesto" remains a touchstone of what "neoliberalism" meant in '80s America for both conservatives and liberals today.

***** Fred Barnes, "Pat Moynihan, Neoliberal," The New Republic, October 21, 1981, pp. 15-18.

****** Nevertheless, Matthew Continetti, blogging at the neoconservative Weekly Standard last May, declared that "the neoliberal tendency is pretty much extinguished these days" in the Democratic Party.  As with so much else printed by his magazine, I suppose I'll just have to disagree.

The Problem Of American Liberalism: Post-Christmas Redux

I'm sorry to be persistent, but can we continue this discussion?

Perhaps, as a starting point, we might construct a bibliography of the best books to tackle each of the questions I posed in relation to the history of American Liberalism. To catalyze your memories, here is the question list from my prior post (somewhat modified):

- When did American liberalism begin? The Progressive Era?
- What was the apex of American liberalism? The early 1960s?
- Is the "liberal project" in America dead? As of when? Perhaps it's still in its death throes?
- What is peculiar about American liberalism in terms of what Max Lerner called the "battlefields of liberalism"?
- Why is liberalism both loved and loathed?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the academy?
- What is liberalism's relationship with American modernity? Are they chronologically the same? Are they two sides of the same coin?
- What is philosophy's relationship with liberalism?
- Who are the most articulate proponents of liberalism in philosophy? Rawls? Dewey? Habermas? Walzer?
- Why is liberalism---in a very weird turn of events---sometimes confused with socialism/communism?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Left? When are they not the same?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Arts?
- Who are exemplars of U.S. political liberalism? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? LBJ?
- How does liberalism cross party lines? Or rather, is there such a category as "Republican Liberalism"?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the common terms of liberal and conservative?
- Could Ronald Reagan be classified as an exemplar of Republican liberalism? Eisenhower?
- What is liberalism in American economic terms?
- What is the relationship between class (economic) and liberalism?
- If liberalism has been instrumental in the construction of something of a "welfare state" in America, why is liberalism reviled by those on the far Left?
- Why is religion's relationship---whether Christian or otherwise---with liberalism troubled?
- Are secularism and liberalism basically synonymous?
- What is liberalism's relationship with multiculturalism? What of pluralism?
- What is postmodernism's relationship with liberalism?
- Why is liberalism prone to the anarchy of license, "absolute liberty," and laissez-faire?
- Can equality exist without liberalism?
- With all this potential confusion about the term, who are "liberals"?

The Problem Of American Liberalism: Post-Christmas Redux

I'm sorry to be persistent, but can we continue this discussion?

Perhaps, as a starting point, we might construct a bibliography of the best books to tackle each of the questions I posed in relation to the history of American Liberalism. To catalyze your memories, here is the question list from my prior post (somewhat modified):

- When did American liberalism begin? The Progressive Era?
- What was the apex of American liberalism? The early 1960s?
- Is the "liberal project" in America dead? As of when? Perhaps it's still in its death throes?
- What is peculiar about American liberalism in terms of what Max Lerner called the "battlefields of liberalism"?
- Why is liberalism both loved and loathed?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the academy?
- What is liberalism's relationship with American modernity? Are they chronologically the same? Are they two sides of the same coin?
- What is philosophy's relationship with liberalism?
- Who are the most articulate proponents of liberalism in philosophy? Rawls? Dewey? Habermas? Walzer?
- Why is liberalism---in a very weird turn of events---sometimes confused with socialism/communism?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Left? When are they not the same?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Arts?
- Who are exemplars of U.S. political liberalism? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? LBJ?
- How does liberalism cross party lines? Or rather, is there such a category as "Republican Liberalism"?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the common terms of liberal and conservative?
- Could Ronald Reagan be classified as an exemplar of Republican liberalism? Eisenhower?
- What is liberalism in American economic terms?
- What is the relationship between class (economic) and liberalism?
- If liberalism has been instrumental in the construction of something of a "welfare state" in America, why is liberalism reviled by those on the far Left?
- Why is religion's relationship---whether Christian or otherwise---with liberalism troubled?
- Are secularism and liberalism basically synonymous?
- What is liberalism's relationship with multiculturalism? What of pluralism?
- What is postmodernism's relationship with liberalism?
- Why is liberalism prone to the anarchy of license, "absolute liberty," and laissez-faire?
- Can equality exist without liberalism?
- With all this potential confusion about the term, who are "liberals"?

The Problem Of American Liberalism

With apologies to H.J. McCloskey, who in 1965 had an article published in The Review of Metaphysics (Vol. 19, no. 2) titled "The Problem of Liberalism," I propose we renew discussion of liberalism for historians today.

McCloskey wrote in what we might view as the height of the era, and in relation to philosophy. It's the 'might' in my prior sentence, however, that has stimulated me to propose the issue for debate here. I want to discuss the problem of liberalism in relation to historians---intellectual historians in particular---studying twentieth-century America.

My proposition is this: Understanding American liberalism in the twentieth century is the single most important issue facing U.S. intellectual historians today.

Why?

Liberalism touches on a daunting array of issues and topics important to studying thought in the century: politics, economics, religion, war, civil rights, individualism, communitarianism, the Progressive Era, the Cold War, the Culture Wars, the New Deal, Reaganism, and the list goes on and on.

Liberalism has also been a side---and sometimes direct---topic of many USIH posts (see here and here and here for recent examples). The topic has of course been covered in all three conferences. But we've never tackled it head on at USIH (until today) as an historiographical problem.

Despite this web of reference, citation, and relevance, I find only cobwebs surrounding the issue both in popular discussion and in the profession. I propose the following questions for debate:

- When did American liberalism begin? What was its apex? Is it over--is the "liberal project" in America dead?
- What is peculiar about American liberalism in terms of what Max Lerner called the "battlefields of liberalism"?
- Why is liberalism both loved and loathed?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the academy?
- What is liberalism's relationship with American modernity?
- What is philosophy's relationship with liberalism?
- Who are the most articulate proponents of liberalism in philosophy? Rawls? Dewey? Habermas? Walzer?
- Why is liberalism, in a very confusing turn of events, sometimes confused with socialism/communism?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Left?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Arts?
- Who are exemplars of U.S. political liberalism? Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
- Could Ronald Reagan be classified as an exemplar of Republican liberalism? Or is Eisenhower a better example?
- How does liberalism cross party lines?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the common terms of liberal and conservative?
- What is liberalism in American economic terms?
- What is the relationship between class (economic) and liberalism?
- If liberalism has been instrumental in the construction of something of a "welfare state" in America, why is liberalism reviled by those on the far Left?
- Why is religion's relationship---whether Christian or otherwise---with liberalism troubled?
- Are secularism and liberalism basically synonymous?
- What is liberalism's relationship with multiculturalism? What of pluralism?
- What is postmodernism's relationship with liberalism?
- With all this potential confusion, who are "liberals"?
- Why is liberalism prone to the anarchy of license, "absolute liberty," and laissez-faire?
- Can equality exist without liberalism?

To catalyze debate in relation to answering some of these questions, I offer the following:

A. A definition of liberalism (from The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, 1997):

-----------------------------------------
1. The state or quality of being liberal.
2.a. A political theory favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.
2.b. The tenets or policies of a Liberal party.
3. An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.
4.a. A 19th-century Protestant movement that favored free intellectual inquiry, stressed the ethical and humanitarian content of Christianity, and de-emphasized dogmatic theology.
4.b. A 19th-century Roman Catholic movement that favored political democracy and ecclesiastical reform.
-----------------------------------------

B. Liberalism as denoted in my thesaurus (Webster's New World/Roget's A-Z Thesaurus, Wiley, 1999):
-----------------------------------------
Synonyms: broad-mindedness, liberality, free-thinking, freedom, radicalism, humanitarianism, humanism, free thought, progressivism, universality, forward view, breadth of mind, latitudinarianism
-----------------------------------------

C. Liberalism according to Wikipedia.

I don't like this article, in part because it uses the term "liberals" loosely in the second line of the piece. I realize that liberals can be used broadly as supporters of "liberalism," but the term has too many present-day negative connotations to be read fairly by non-specialist readers of the entry. ...Then again, a fair reader (rare) would see that "liberals" could apply to wide parts of both currently dominant American political parties. It is probably the case that Wikipedia's entry for "social liberalism" best encapsulates twentieth-century American liberalism as discussed by historians. But that entry is long, and this post is getting too long.

D. Liberalism according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (circa 1996, authored by Gerald Gaus and Shane Courtland.

I love the opening closing paragraphs (bolds mine):

As soon as one examines it, ‘liberalism’ fractures into a variety of types and competing visions. In this entry we focus on debates within the liberal tradition. We begin by (1) examining different interpretations of liberalism's core commitment — liberty. We then consider (2) the longstanding debate between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ liberalism. In section (3) we turn to the more recent controversy about whether liberalism is a ‘comprehensive’ or a ‘political’ doctrine. We close in (4) by considering disagreements as to ‘the reach’ of liberalism — does it apply to all humankind, and must all political communities be liberal? ...

Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues — the nature of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal — one might wonder whether there is any point in talking of ‘liberalism’ at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these conceptions of political right.*

*I have no idea what this last line means.

E. Liberalism according to the Encyclopedia Britannica (circa 1960 as defined by Max Lerner).

Here are the opening lines of that essay:
-----------------------------------------
.Liberalism is the creed, philosophy and movement which is committed to freedom as a method and policy in government, as an organizing principle in society and as a way of life for the individual and community. As a term it took its origins from the "Liberales," a Spanish political party in the early 19th century, but received its widest currency in the English language. As an idea and philosophy it predates its use as a term, and can be traced back to the Judaeo-Christian-Greek intellectual world, along with the idea of liberty itself with which it is closely linked.

Confusion of Terms.--Some of the confusions about liberalism arise from the various stages of meaning through which the term passed during a history of several centuries, and from the wide diversity of uses to which it has been put. There were in the second half of the 20th century a number of political parties, in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, called by the name of the "Liberal party" or some variant of it; there was a party of the same name active in the politics of New York state; and even a Liberal International which served as a clearinghouse for liberal political movements throughout the world. But while these parties expressed the liberal outlook, that outlook was not limited to them.
-----------------------------------------

There is much to recommend in this essay, particularly it's last section ("Liberalism in the Second Half of the 20th Century"), but notice how "Confusion of Terms" opens the second paragraph---not surprisingly.

I think we can see here how liberalism, as used in discussions about twentieth-century America, could be confusing. That said, in terms of a dictionary definition, I believe that 2.a. gets closest to the core of what I want to discuss in relation to every other topic outlined in the questions above.

With this breadth of associations and terminology, how are we---as writers and readers of history---to discuss "liberalism" with any clarity? Indeed, what is "liberalism" in twentieth-century America? It should be clear with this post that, at the very least, any historical narrative using this term without careful definition exposes itself to equivocation.

To be continued...- TL

PS (11:30 CST, 12/23): If possible, in discussion I would ask that we not use the term 'liberalism' to designate the political, social, and culture desires of 'liberals' (i.e the perceived 'Left' in America). In other words, I want to go against the common usage of the term liberalism in relation to the world of pundits and social commentators. I want to use liberalism in its most philosophical sense.

The Problem Of American Liberalism

With apologies to H.J. McCloskey, who in 1965 had an article published in The Review of Metaphysics (Vol. 19, no. 2) titled "The Problem of Liberalism," I propose we renew discussion of liberalism for historians today.

McCloskey wrote in what we might view as the height of the era, and in relation to philosophy. It's the 'might' in my prior sentence, however, that has stimulated me to propose the issue for debate here. I want to discuss the problem of liberalism in relation to historians---intellectual historians in particular---studying twentieth-century America.

My proposition is this: Understanding American liberalism in the twentieth century is the single most important issue facing U.S. intellectual historians today.

Why?

Liberalism touches on a daunting array of issues and topics important to studying thought in the century: politics, economics, religion, war, civil rights, individualism, communitarianism, the Progressive Era, the Cold War, the Culture Wars, the New Deal, Reaganism, and the list goes on and on.

Liberalism has also been a side---and sometimes direct---topic of many USIH posts (see here and here and here for recent examples). The topic has of course been covered in all three conferences. But we've never tackled it head on at USIH (until today) as an historiographical problem.

Despite this web of reference, citation, and relevance, I find only cobwebs surrounding the issue both in popular discussion and in the profession. I propose the following questions for debate:

- When did American liberalism begin? What was its apex? Is it over--is the "liberal project" in America dead?
- What is peculiar about American liberalism in terms of what Max Lerner called the "battlefields of liberalism"?
- Why is liberalism both loved and loathed?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the academy?
- What is liberalism's relationship with American modernity?
- What is philosophy's relationship with liberalism?
- Who are the most articulate proponents of liberalism in philosophy? Rawls? Dewey? Habermas? Walzer?
- Why is liberalism, in a very confusing turn of events, sometimes confused with socialism/communism?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Left?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Arts?
- Who are exemplars of U.S. political liberalism? Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
- Could Ronald Reagan be classified as an exemplar of Republican liberalism? Or is Eisenhower a better example?
- How does liberalism cross party lines?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the common terms of liberal and conservative?
- What is liberalism in American economic terms?
- What is the relationship between class (economic) and liberalism?
- If liberalism has been instrumental in the construction of something of a "welfare state" in America, why is liberalism reviled by those on the far Left?
- Why is religion's relationship---whether Christian or otherwise---with liberalism troubled?
- Are secularism and liberalism basically synonymous?
- What is liberalism's relationship with multiculturalism? What of pluralism?
- What is postmodernism's relationship with liberalism?
- With all this potential confusion, who are "liberals"?
- Why is liberalism prone to the anarchy of license, "absolute liberty," and laissez-faire?
- Can equality exist without liberalism?

To catalyze debate in relation to answering some of these questions, I offer the following:

A. A definition of liberalism (from The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, 1997):

-----------------------------------------
1. The state or quality of being liberal.
2.a. A political theory favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.
2.b. The tenets or policies of a Liberal party.
3. An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.
4.a. A 19th-century Protestant movement that favored free intellectual inquiry, stressed the ethical and humanitarian content of Christianity, and de-emphasized dogmatic theology.
4.b. A 19th-century Roman Catholic movement that favored political democracy and ecclesiastical reform.
-----------------------------------------

B. Liberalism as denoted in my thesaurus (Webster's New World/Roget's A-Z Thesaurus, Wiley, 1999):
-----------------------------------------
Synonyms: broad-mindedness, liberality, free-thinking, freedom, radicalism, humanitarianism, humanism, free thought, progressivism, universality, forward view, breadth of mind, latitudinarianism
-----------------------------------------

C. Liberalism according to Wikipedia.

I don't like this article, in part because it uses the term "liberals" loosely in the second line of the piece. I realize that liberals can be used broadly as supporters of "liberalism," but the term has too many present-day negative connotations to be read fairly by non-specialist readers of the entry. ...Then again, a fair reader (rare) would see that "liberals" could apply to wide parts of both currently dominant American political parties. It is probably the case that Wikipedia's entry for "social liberalism" best encapsulates twentieth-century American liberalism as discussed by historians. But that entry is long, and this post is getting too long.

D. Liberalism according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (circa 1996, authored by Gerald Gaus and Shane Courtland.

I love the opening closing paragraphs (bolds mine):

As soon as one examines it, ‘liberalism’ fractures into a variety of types and competing visions. In this entry we focus on debates within the liberal tradition. We begin by (1) examining different interpretations of liberalism's core commitment — liberty. We then consider (2) the longstanding debate between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ liberalism. In section (3) we turn to the more recent controversy about whether liberalism is a ‘comprehensive’ or a ‘political’ doctrine. We close in (4) by considering disagreements as to ‘the reach’ of liberalism — does it apply to all humankind, and must all political communities be liberal? ...

Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues — the nature of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal — one might wonder whether there is any point in talking of ‘liberalism’ at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these conceptions of political right.*

*I have no idea what this last line means.

E. Liberalism according to the Encyclopedia Britannica (circa 1960 as defined by Max Lerner).

Here are the opening lines of that essay:
-----------------------------------------
.Liberalism is the creed, philosophy and movement which is committed to freedom as a method and policy in government, as an organizing principle in society and as a way of life for the individual and community. As a term it took its origins from the "Liberales," a Spanish political party in the early 19th century, but received its widest currency in the English language. As an idea and philosophy it predates its use as a term, and can be traced back to the Judaeo-Christian-Greek intellectual world, along with the idea of liberty itself with which it is closely linked.

Confusion of Terms.--Some of the confusions about liberalism arise from the various stages of meaning through which the term passed during a history of several centuries, and from the wide diversity of uses to which it has been put. There were in the second half of the 20th century a number of political parties, in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, called by the name of the "Liberal party" or some variant of it; there was a party of the same name active in the politics of New York state; and even a Liberal International which served as a clearinghouse for liberal political movements throughout the world. But while these parties expressed the liberal outlook, that outlook was not limited to them.
-----------------------------------------

There is much to recommend in this essay, particularly it's last section ("Liberalism in the Second Half of the 20th Century"), but notice how "Confusion of Terms" opens the second paragraph---not surprisingly.

I think we can see here how liberalism, as used in discussions about twentieth-century America, could be confusing. That said, in terms of a dictionary definition, I believe that 2.a. gets closest to the core of what I want to discuss in relation to every other topic outlined in the questions above.

With this breadth of associations and terminology, how are we---as writers and readers of history---to discuss "liberalism" with any clarity? Indeed, what is "liberalism" in twentieth-century America? It should be clear with this post that, at the very least, any historical narrative using this term without careful definition exposes itself to equivocation.

To be continued...- TL

PS (11:30 CST, 12/23): If possible, in discussion I would ask that we not use the term 'liberalism' to designate the political, social, and culture desires of 'liberals' (i.e the perceived 'Left' in America). In other words, I want to go against the common usage of the term liberalism in relation to the world of pundits and social commentators. I want to use liberalism in its most philosophical sense.