Neoliberalism began as a name liberals chose for themselves in 1938. By the 2000s it was almost never a name anyone chose for themselves.
“Neoliberalism” gets used in political and academic writing as though it names one coherent, agreed-upon doctrine with a fixed membership list of thinkers and policies. A content analysis of how the term is actually used says otherwise: a 2009 study of 148 peer-reviewed journal articles found the term left undefined in most of them, applied unevenly depending on the author’s own politics, and stretched to cover an unusually broad range of policies, institutions, and historical periods, evidence that “neoliberalism” functions in practice as a loosely bounded label, not a technical term with settled content (Boas and Gans-Morse, 2009).
The term has a specific origin that its current usage has mostly erased. It was coined in 1938 at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, a Paris gathering of liberal intellectuals including Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and Walter Lippmann himself, by the German sociologist and economist Alexander Rüstow. Rüstow’s “neoliberalism” named a specific, moderate position: a renewal of classical liberalism that kept its commitment to markets and price signals while explicitly rejecting 19th-century laissez-faire’s assumption that markets sustain themselves without a strong legal and institutional framework. In that original sense it described roughly what later became German Ordoliberalism, a school arguing for active state maintenance of competition and a social safety net alongside market allocation, not their absence.
That positive, self-chosen sense did not stick. By the late 20th century, “neoliberalism” had become a term applied almost exclusively by critics, describing the market-oriented reforms, deregulation, privatization, trade liberalization, and fiscal austerity associated with the Reagan and Thatcher governments and later exported globally through the IMF and World Bank’s “Washington Consensus.” David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) is the standard critical academic treatment of this later sense, arguing that neoliberalism functioned less as a coherent growth strategy than as a decades-long project to restore the income and power of the wealthiest economic class after a period of postwar redistribution.
The two senses rarely meet in ordinary usage. Almost no contemporary economist or policymaker describes their own program as “neoliberal”; the word survives almost entirely as something applied from outside, most often to policies associated with figures like Milton Friedman and to the deregulatory reading of capitalism built up around them, which is part of why Boas and Gans-Morse treat its contested status as more than an academic curiosity.
Source: Boas, Taylor C., and Gans-Morse, Jordan, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 44(2), 2009, pp. 137-161. Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005.