Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Neoliberalism as a distinctive strand of liberal ideology first appeared in the 1940s, but its period of major influence is usually dated from the 1970s. The label is disliked by neoliberals themselves, who generally prefer to be known as classical liberals, libertarians, social market liberals, or simply liberals. Neoliberalism is not a uniform doctrine and has many internal tensions, not least between a laissez-faire strand which believes that the best policy is to allow markets to operate with as few impediments as possible, and a social market strand which believes that for the free market to reach its full potential the state has to be active in creating and sustaining the institutions which make that possible. The first people to call themselves neoliberals were German liberals such as Alexander Rüstow, who first used the term in the 1930s to describe new currents of liberal thought that were hostile to the forms of statism and collectivism which had been so dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, and sought a new form of political economy that would give priority to market rather than bureaucratic or hierarchical means of ordering the economy, within a framework of law. The German neoliberals sought to revive liberal principles after the devastating impact of Nazi totalitarianism on German society and politics, by calling for a return to the rule of law, a ... log in or subscribe to read full text