Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 70

The Anglo-American Model of

Neoliberalism of the 1980s:


Construction, Development and
Dissemination Nathalie Lévy
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-anglo-american-model-of-neoliberalism-of-the-198
0s-construction-development-and-dissemination-nathalie-levy/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The American Revolution 1774 83 2nd Edition Daniel


Marston

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-american-
revolution-1774-83-2nd-edition-daniel-marston/

Global Learning and International Development in the


Age of Neoliberalism 1st Edition Stephen Mccloskey

https://ebookmeta.com/product/global-learning-and-international-
development-in-the-age-of-neoliberalism-1st-edition-stephen-
mccloskey/

The Limits of Law and Development : Neoliberalism,


Governance and Social Justice 1st Edition Sam Adelman

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-limits-of-law-and-development-
neoliberalism-governance-and-social-justice-1st-edition-sam-
adelman/

Glocalization and the Development of a Hybrid


Leadership Model Glocalization and the Development of a
Hybrid Leadership Model A Study Of Chinese University
Presidency 1st Edition Qingyan Tian
https://ebookmeta.com/product/glocalization-and-the-development-
of-a-hybrid-leadership-model-glocalization-and-the-development-
of-a-hybrid-leadership-model-a-study-of-chinese-university-
The Performance of Normativity Mormons and the
Construction of an American Masculinity Analecta
Gorgiana Elizabeth Ruchti

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-performance-of-normativity-
mormons-and-the-construction-of-an-american-masculinity-analecta-
gorgiana-elizabeth-ruchti/

The Future of Decline Anglo American Culture at Its


Limits 1st Edition Jed Esty

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-future-of-decline-anglo-
american-culture-at-its-limits-1st-edition-jed-esty/

The Arsenal of Democracy Aircraft Supply and the Anglo


American Alliance 1938 1942 1st Edition Gavin J. Bailey

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-arsenal-of-democracy-aircraft-
supply-and-the-anglo-american-alliance-1938-1942-1st-edition-
gavin-j-bailey/

The Deep Roots of American Neoliberalism. A Cultural,


Economic, and Philosophical History 1st Edition Bruce
N. Waller

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-deep-roots-of-american-
neoliberalism-a-cultural-economic-and-philosophical-history-1st-
edition-bruce-n-waller/

The American Revolution In the Law Anglo American


Jurisprudence before John Marshall Shannon C. Stimson

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-american-revolution-in-the-law-
anglo-american-jurisprudence-before-john-marshall-shannon-c-
stimson/
The Anglo-American
Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s
Construction, Development
and Dissemination

Edited by
Nathalie Lévy · Alexis Chommeloux ·
Nathalie A. Champroux ·
Stéphane Porion · Selma Josso ·
Audrey Damiens
The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s
Nathalie Lévy · Alexis Chommeloux ·
Nathalie A. Champroux · Stéphane Porion ·
Selma Josso · Audrey Damiens
Editors

The Anglo-American
Model
of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s
Construction, Development and Dissemination
Editors
Nathalie Lévy Alexis Chommeloux
University of Tours University of Tours
Tours, France Tours, France

Nathalie A. Champroux Stéphane Porion


University of Tours University of Tours
Tours, France Tours, France

Selma Josso Audrey Damiens


University of Tours University of Tours
Tours, France Tours, France

ISBN 978-3-031-12073-2 ISBN 978-3-031-12074-9 (eBook)


https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12074-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword

Since the end of the “long 1990s”, the advance of new forms of economic
and political reaction has opened up fresh questions about how neoliber-
alism shaped present crises in Europe and the United States. The historical
development of neoliberal politics, the compass of its explanatory power
and its continued relevance remain contested. The chapters in this rich
collection deepen our understanding of these critical historical questions
by focusing on specific examples of neoliberal dissemination in practice.
This volume presents an impressive range of fine-grained research that
sheds light on the enduring problem of the meaning and significance of
neoliberalism. Three critical themes emerge, which it seems to me, are
essential to a critical appreciation of the role of neoliberalism in recent and
contemporary transatlantic political, economic and intellectual history.
First, the contributions in this book are grounded in the particular
political struggles in which neoliberal politics took shape in different
contexts. It is only through detailed analysis of these moments and
movements in Europe and the United States that the real significance
of neoliberalism is clarified. Within crucial points of inflection exam-
ined through case studies ranging from Chirac’s brief premiership in the
1980s or Walt Disney’s neoliberalisation of culture to European policy
initiatives such as the European Semester or Social Impact Bonds, the
chapters show how neoliberal ideas were introduced, often in tension with
older embedded ideas, whether liberal, conservative, social-democratic or
authoritarian. Importantly, neoliberalism is not a single thing, good or

v
vi FOREWORD

bad. Its many manifestations were tempered and tapered by the continued
power of alternative ideas. Yet, neoliberal ideas often broke through and,
over time, a new paradigm that the “market works” became entrenched.
The extraordinary variety of these chapters mirrors the diverse influence of
neoliberal politics across the very different political cultures of the United
States, the United Kingdom, France and Europe.
Second, most clearly, the troubled relationship of neoliberal ideas with
democracy illustrates why neoliberal economic models persist amidst the
chaos of resurgent authoritarian populism. Neoliberalism was never simply
the “End of History”, the generator or guarantor of a harmonious liberal
democracy. Friedman, Buchanan and Hayek all emphasised neoliberal
economic freedom over democracy, not the other way around. Dereg-
ulation had powerful regulatory effects that reframed the balance of
economic and political power. Liberalisation reduced the power of labour.
Economic freedom, defined as self-interested market exchange, was more
important in the neoliberal worldview than political freedom. Applica-
tions of neoliberalism could therefore quite happily coexist with social
illiberalism or worse because neoliberal freedom was never conceived in
terms of democratic accountability. Democratic freedom was incidental
and, as it has turned out, entirely contingent. Many of the chapters in this
book highlight this feature of neoliberalism as essential to understanding
the historical influence and role of neoliberal ideas and politics but also
provide insight into why its influence is likely to continue.
Third, the book’s focus on the critical political struggles, successes
and challenges of neoliberalism avoids an unduly narrow focus on the
intellectual lights of the Mont Pelerin Society, important though many
of its members were to the trajectory of neoliberal ideas. These ideas
mattered less for the ups and downs of figures within its intellectual clubs
and more for their mediated and interpreted application to real political
and economic problems. It was in these arenas that ideas drove historical
change. The detailed case studies presented here provide a necessary lens
if we are to refine our answers to the central question of the meaning of
neoliberalism.
I am honoured to recommend reading this collection. It will sharpen
understanding of neoliberal politics, its past and future.

London, UK Daniel Stedman Jones


Contents

1 Liberalism in Twentieth Century Britain


and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America:
Contacts, Conflicts and Connections (1832–1945) 1
Kenneth O. Morgan
2 The Intellectual Roots of Neoliberalism: Advocating
for a New Paradigm (1945–1979) 13
Stéphane Porion and Sébastien Mort
3 Introduction 27
Nathalie A. Champroux, Alexis Chommeloux,
and Stéphane Porion

Part I The Neoliberal Model, Theoretical and Political


Perspectives
4 Standing the Test of Time? The “Resilience”
of the Anglo-American Neoliberal Paradigm
in the Post-financial Crisis, Post-Covid Era 49
Martine Azuelos
5 Genealogy and Architecture of a Global Model: The
Role of British and American Conservative Think
Tanks in the Dissemination of Neoliberal Ideas 65
Virgile Lorenzoni

vii
viii CONTENTS

6 Anglo-American Neoliberalism: An Illiberal Model? 81


Raphaël Demias-Morisset
7 Neoliberalism in Britain: From Origins to Orthodoxy 97
Peter Dorey
8 Winning Without Winning: Neoliberalism, Public
Opinion, and Electoral Politics in the United States
(1968–2000) 117
Robert Mason

Part II Transfer of the Neoliberal Paradigm Within the


Anglosphere
9 The Originalism of American Federal Judges
or the Establishment of Constitutional Foundations
for Economic Liberalism Since the 1970s 137
Thierry Kirat and Frédéric Marty
10 Was United States Financial Liberalisation
in the 1980s Inspired by the Neoliberal Model?
(1913–2013) 155
Nathalie Lévy
11 From Thatcher to Johnson: 40 years of Neoliberalism
in the UK, Continuities and Adaptations 177
Catherine Mathieu
12 Exploring the Neoliberal Health Legacy in Britain 193
Louise Dalingwater
13 The Limits of the Neoliberal Paradigm? Health Care
Politics and the Sexual Revolutions in the United
States at a Time of Crisis (1970–1992) 211
Jonathan Bell
14 Detention of Undocumented Migrants: From
Reagan’s Neoliberal, Money-Led Legacy to a More
Humanistic Approach 227
Agnès de Fraissinette
CONTENTS ix

Part III Dissemination in Europe


15 Expanding the Kingdom: The Walt Disney Company
as a Purveyor of Neoliberal Logic 247
Ilias Ben Mna
16 Has Anglo-American Neoliberalism Been a Model
for France? The Case of Economic and Financial
Reforms (1986–1988) 263
Florence Descamps and Laure Quennouëlle-Corre
17 European Economic Governance, the European
Semester and Health: Reflections from the French
Case 279
Selma Josso
18 From New Public Management to Social Impact
Bonds: The European Experience 293
Rosella Carè
19 From “No-Liberalism” to Neoliberalism in Central
Eastern Europe of the Late Twentieth Century:
A Success Story? 319
Barbara Curyło

Index 331
Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Nathalie Lévy is Senior Lecturer at the University of Tours (France) and


Researcher at IRJI François-Rabelais. She holds a Ph.D. in economics
from the University of Nanterre—Paris 10. Her research focuses on
monetary economics, financial structures and transparency.

Alexis Chommeloux is Senior Lecturer at the University of Tours


(France), where he teaches in the Law & Languages Department,
and Researcher at ICD. Holder of a Ph.D. from Université Sorbonne
Nouvelle—Paris 3, his research, which focused initially on the relationship
between British employers and the Conservative Party, now encompasses
various aspects of British studies which he examines mainly from a legal
perspective.

Nathalie A. Champroux is Professor at the University of Tours (France)


and Researcher at ICD, after studying at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—
Paris 3 and teaching at UPEC—Paris 12. She teaches British History at
the Department of Modern Languages Studies. Her research focuses on
modern economic history, particularly on British monetary policy since
1945.

xi
xii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Stéphane Porion is Senior Lecturer of British Political History at


the University of Tours (France) and Researcher at ICD. Holder
of a Ph.D. in Humanities—Anglo-American Studies from Université
Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3, his research focuses on Conservative polit-
ical and economic thoughts from 1945 to the present days, especially
Enoch Powel’s and Diana Spearman’s.

Selma Josso is Senior Lecturer at the University of Tours (France)


and Researcher at IRJI François-Rabelais. She holds a Ph.D. in Public
Law from the University of Montpellier (France). Her research focuses
on European economic governance, European semester and soft law.
She is currently Vice-President of the University of Tours, in charge of
partnerships with civil society and the economic world.

Audrey Damiens is Senior Lecturer at the University of Tours (France).


She holds a Ph.D. in private law from the University of Orleans (France).
Her research focuses on civil procedures, private international law and
family law.

Contributors

Azuelos Martine is Emeritus Professor of Anglo-American Studies at


Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3 (France). Her research focuses
on contemporary economic policies in Britain and the United States,
the dynamics of Anglo-American capitalism, and its role in driving
globalisation and regional economic integration.
Bell Jonathan is Professor of US History at the UCL Institute of the
Americas in London (UK). He is the author or editor of several books
on American political history and is currently working on a history of the
relationship between sexual rights and health care in the modern United
States.
Ben Mna Ilias earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Humboldt
University of Berlin (Germany) as well as a master’s degree in Busi-
ness Administration and Anglo/American Studies from the University
of Mannheim (Germany). He currently teaches film history and anal-
ysis at the Department of American Studies, Humboldt University of
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Berlin. His research interests include US popular culture, media theory,


US presidential rhetoric and political discourse analysis.
Carè Rosella is Assistant Professor of Banking and Finance at the Univer-
sity of Cagliari (Italy) and Marie Curie Research Fellow at Waterloo
University (Canada). Her major research areas include social and sustain-
able finance, impact investing, sustainable banking, Environmental, Social
and Governance (ESG) risks, climate risks and financial stability.
Curyło Barbara is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science and
Administration of the Faculty of Political Science and Social Communi-
cation of the University of Opole (Poland). She completed her Ph.D. in
Political Science at the Faculty of Journalism and Political Sciences at the
University of Warsaw (Poland). She is a member of the European Review
editorial team. She specialises in EU studies, Central Eastern Europe and
public diplomacy.
Dalingwater Louise is Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities
of Sorbonne Université (France). Her work is focused on health policy,
healthcare delivery and wellbeing in the United Kingdom, with some
comparative research on European health systems and global health policy
research.
de Fraissinette Agnès is Lecturer at the University of Tours (France). She
holds a Ph.D. in Humanities—Anglo-American Studies (Université Paris-
Sorbonne—Paris 4) and a master’s degree in International and European
Law (Université Panthéon-Assas—Paris 2). She is a statutory member of
the ICD laboratory of the University of Tours.
Demias-Morisset Raphaël is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the
University of Bordeaux (France). His research, at IRM, is mainly in the
field of political theory, comparative politics and constitutional law theory.
He particularly works on the conflict between neoliberalism and liberalism
from both a theoretical and comparative perspective.
Descamps Florence is Senior Lecturer of History at École Pratique des
Hautes Études (EPHE-PSL) in Paris (France). Her research interests lie
in the modern history of State, more particularly in the history of French
Ministry of Finance and public finance.
Dorey Peter is Professor of British Politics in the School of Law and
Politics at Cardiff University (UK). He has published over 100 articles,
xiv EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

books and chapters on aspects of British politics since 1945, and has a
particular academic interest in British Conservatism, and the politics of
the Conservative Party.
Kirat Thierry, Ph.D. in Economics is Senior Researcher at CNRS
(France) and Affiliated Professor at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
(France). He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on
Social Sciences (IRISSO) at Université Paris-Dauphine- PSL (France).
Specialist of the relations between law and economics, he is currently
working on the influence of economic ideas upon public policies and on
the fairness of algorithmic decisions.
Lorenzoni Virgile is a Ph.D. candidate and a member of the Labora-
toire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
at the University of Aix-Marseille (France). His doctoral thesis focuses
on Conservative think tanks and the role they play in the relationship
between ideas and political action.
Marty Frédéric is Senior Researcher at CNRS (France). Ph.D. in
economics, his work focuses on competition law and economics. He is a
member of the Group of Research on Law, Economics, and Management
(GREDEG), a joint research unit of the CNRS and of the University of
Côte d’Azur (France).
Mason Robert is Professor of US History at the University of Edin-
burgh (UK). He is the author of Richard Nixon and the Quest for a
New Majority (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004) and The Republican Party and
American Politics from Hoover to Reagan (New York, 2012).
Mathieu Catherine is an economist at OFCE (Observatoire Français
des Conjonctures Économiques) in Paris (France). She is President of
the AIECE (Association of European Conjuncture Institutes). Her main
research interests include the UK economy, European economic policies
and macro-economic forecasting.
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xv

Morgan Kenneth O. (Prof.) has been a member of the House of Lords


of UK Parliament since 2000, Fellow of the British Academy since 1983
and Fellow of The Queen’s College in Oxford (UK) since 1966. He was
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales (UK) from 1989 to 1996. He
has written 36 books.
Mort Sébastien is Senior Lecturer of American Studies at the Univer-
sity of Lorraine (France) and Researcher at CREM. Holder of a Ph.D.
in Humanities—Anglo-American Studies from Université Sorbonne
Nouvelle—Paris 3, his research focuses on the intersection between poli-
tics and the media in the United States, with particular emphasis on
the communication and media strategy of the Republican Party and the
conservative movement.
Quennouelle-Corre Laure is Senior Researcher at Centre de Recherches
Historiques (CRH), a research lab of CNRS-CRS and École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (France). Her research
focuses on French modern economic and financial history, more specifi-
cally on the relationship between the State and the market, public debt,
financial regulation and monetary policy.
Stedman Jones Daniel, educated at Pimlico Comprehensive School and
New College, Oxford, completed his Ph.D. in history at the University
of Pennsylvania (US). He has written and presented many articles and
papers and has published widely (Masters of the Universe: Hayek Friedman
and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton. 2012, 2014). He formerly
worked in policy including for the leading independent think-tank Demos
and as a government policy adviser (1999–2003). He is now a barrister
working in 39 Essex Chambers in London (UK).
List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 Financial liberalisation index from 1913 to 2013 (author’s


elaboration) 158
Fig. 10.2 Scores for “Entry barriers” and “Supervision”
of the banking sector 173
Fig. 10.3 Scores of “Credit controls” and “Interest rates Controls” 173
Fig. 10.4 Scores of “Security markets” and “Capital inflows” 174
Fig. 17.1 European semester calendar (Source European
institutions) 282
Fig. 17.2 Example of intra-recommendation repetitions (author’s
elaboration) 283
Fig. 17.3 Comparative table of excerpts from the 2014 and 2015
recommendations 283
Fig. 17.4 Graph: occurrences of “Health” in the Council’s
recommendations (author’s elaboration) 286
Fig. 17.5 Extract of the French National Reform Programme
2015—Appendix 4, p. 162 (Source French Government) 288
Fig. 18.1 The SIB model (author’s elaboration) 296
Fig. 18.2 Distribution by country (Data as of September 2021)
(Authors’ elaboration on INDIGO data [Data are
available at the following link: https://golab.bsg.ox.ac.
uk/knowledge-bank/indigo/download-indigo-data/]) 298
Fig. 18.3 Distribution by welfare area (Authors’ elaboration
on INDIGO data [Data are available at the following
link: https://golab.bsg.ox.ac.uk/knowledge-bank/ind
igo/download-indigo-data/]) 298

xvii
CHAPTER 1

Liberalism in Twentieth Century Britain


and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century
America: Contacts, Conflicts
and Connections (1832–1945)

Kenneth O. Morgan

Introduction
Neo-liberalism was one of many later outgrowths of the liberal political
philosophy that emerged in Western Europe in the eighteenth century,
was particularly associated with the French philosophes and the Ency-
clopédie edited by Denis Diderot and absorbed many of the key ideas of
the so-called Enlightenment. But neoliberalism, as espoused by British
and American conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, was a quite different set of ideas from
the outward-looking libertarian creed that had flowed on from France to
Georgian Britain and then the US. Its modern originator was perhaps the

K. O. Morgan (B)
House of Lords, Westminster, UK
e-mail: kenneth.morgan@hotmail.co.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1


Switzerland AG 2022
N. Lévy et al. (eds.), The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12074-9_1
2 K. O. MORGAN

Austrian-born, British economic writer, Friedrich Hayek. It focussed on


economic themes, the central importance of market forces and control of
the money supply, the role of competition as the crucial element of finan-
cial economic activity alongside the diminution of the role of the central
state, as the key to prosperity. It was thus totally opposed to the views
of the great British economic philosopher, John Maynard Keynes. But
the essence of liberalism lay elsewhere as a philosophy of self-realization
and social inter-action, of civic freedom, the free movement of capital and
trade, national liberation and global peace. It was a creed, almost a faith,
a moral inspiration. It is essential to understand the roots of nineteenth-
century liberalism in Britain, from which emerged important strains of
progressive reform in the US after the civil war. Therefore, it is this anal-
ysis of transatlantic liberalism, including the little-known theme, much
ignored by historians, of the influence of other European nations on the
“age of Reform” across the ocean, that forms the central argument of this
preamble.

Great Britain’s Liberalism


Liberalism, in its different nuances, was a central theme on both sides of
the Atlantic. In Britain, it was the outcome of two revolutions. One was
economic, an industrial transformation which rebalanced the economy
and social structure, and created new industrial cities which had to be
adjusted and recognized in the old social order. There was also the
political revolution in France in 1789, which transformed public life by
introducing new ideas of republicanism and social rights. In Britain as
in other European countries, it led to a growing ferment after the end
of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 in favour of political, legal and social
Reform. It generated a new and different meaning in the post-war period,
symbolized by the philosophical contrast between the two ideological
contestants, Edmund Burke and Tom Paine. For Burke, in a famous
parliamentary motion in 1782, it meant a readjustment between Crown
and Parliament, an echo of the great conflict which had brought about
two civil wars in the 1640s. In the works of Paine and others after the war,
the dialogue focussed on relations between Parliament and the people.
It was hugely stimulated by the “massacre” at Peterloo in Manchester
when the violent suppression of a large crowd calling for the reform of
Parliament and the franchise led to serious loss of life, including those of
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 3

women and children. As Shelley wrote in a powerful poem, “The Masque


of Anarchy,” “We are many, ye are few.”
In Britain, social protest stemmed from the mighty conflict over the
1832 Reform Act, following on from the impact of the second French
Revolution of 1830 which saw the last of the Bourbons. There was
immense political excitement—the “days of May”—when efforts were
made to undermine the British economy, especially the gold standard,
by “going for gold” to defeat the reactionary Prime Minister, the Duke
of Wellington. The second reading of the Reform Bill was carried by one
vote amidst almost revolutionary excitement, and the Lords finally had to
give way when King William IV threatened to create a clutch of new peers
to ensure that the government carried its way. It was far from a radical
measure, but rather an exercise in limitations carried out by a government
of largely wealthy Whigs, men like Grey and Melbourne. The redis-
tribution of constituencies was very limited—56 rotten boroughs were
abolished, and just 22 new constituencies were created, just 14 of them
in the newly industrialized north. The rights of property-holders were
amply sustained: £10 householders retained the seats in the boroughs and
the landed interests were upheld in the counties. In several constituencies
the electorate went down, not up. The secret ballot was pushed aside,
enabling major landowners in Wales to preserve their influence over their
tenants, while votes for women were basically derided.
But it was the vital first step even if nowhere near creating a democracy.
Britain now had the largest franchise in Europe. The idea of wider insti-
tutional reform swept into other areas—the established Church, the law,
local government, most controversial in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment
Act with its pernicious doctrine of “less eligibility.” The group which
merged into a coalition of Whigs, radicals and Irish MPs supplied a new
impetus for politics, and further major reforms of parliament followed in
1867, 1884–1885, 1918 and 1928. It was firmly established that, with
a few freak exceptions like university seats, the franchise was applied on
individual grounds rather than the value of one’s land or other property.
As Peel observed ruefully in 1832, Reform was a door that, once pushed
open, could never be closed.
The supporters of Reform soon became a nationwide party. There
were the beginnings of party organization in the later 1830s, amongst
the Tories as well as the Whig-Liberals. Creative use was made of the
political club. Peel arranged for the new Conservatives to be based in the
Carlton in Pall Mall, the reformers in the Reform Club, also in Pall Mall.
4 K. O. MORGAN

The Liberals went to great lengths to prove their cultural as well as polit-
ical superiority, as with hiring the famous French chef, Alexis Soyer who
founded a new political delicacy, Lamb Cutlets Reform. The reformers
then merged in a political alliance, in specific terms with the exceptionally
conservative Lord Palmerston as their leader after the famous meeting at
Willis’s Rooms in London in 1859.
The political alliance then took formal shape with a central Registration
body set up after the passage of the 1867 Parliament Act (the work of the
Conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli who had once applied for member-
ship of the Reform Club in 1836), followed by the National Liberal
Federation to provide organizational unity for reformers throughout
Britain. Parties sprang up throughout the country. Important newspapers
appeared to promote the Liberal cause, notably the Manchester Guardian
which still exists today, though its links with urban Manchester have been
dropped, and the Leeds Mercury. A popular Liberal press sprang up in
every major city while all the Welsh-language newspapers in Wales were
Liberal, with their strong links with the chapels which sought the disestab-
lishment of the Anglican Church. It was a Celtic variation on the historic
slogan of Peace, Retrenchment and Reform.
Of course, Liberalism and the Liberal Party were far more than a
philosophy. They had important social, economic and legal aspects. They
were, for instance, closely connected with Civil Rights, especially those
of nonconformist Protestants in the chapels. Following up connections
built up with the Whigs in the seventeenth century, the chapels battled
for equality of status as entrants into university (more particularly Oxford
and Cambridge), as magistrates, peers, and in relation to their rights to
be baptized and buried in parish churchyards. In Wales, Dissent was the
creed of three quarters of the people, as shown in the 1851 census and
the 1906 commission inquiries, who were felt to be second-class citizens,
and in conflict not only with common democracy but with the very idea
of Wales as a nation.
Secondly Liberalism had an important economic belief—that of free
trade, as a guarantee of international prosperity but, in the views of
Cobden and Bright, also of international peace. Following on from ideas
amongst the French Encyclopaedists, and English Philosophical Radicals
who followed Bentham, Ricardo and J.S. Mill, free trade struck a huge
blow for liberal principles with the Repeal of the Corn Laws by Sir Robert
Peel. Gladstone became the movement’s outstanding recruit and the most
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 5

influential Liberal for the next hundred years, the “grand old man” and
“the people’s William...”
In a different area, Liberalism became associated with overseas nation-
alism, people (invariably in Europe only) “struggling to be free.” Thus,
even via such belligerent spokesmen as Lord Palmerston, Britain backed
the causes of liberation for the Greeks in the 1820s, the Italians in the
1860s and the Bulgarians in the 1870s. But significantly, these moral
precepts did not apply to Britain’s own imperial passions. In the Boer
War of 1899–1902, leading Liberals were deeply divided and spoke of
“methods of barbarism” on the veldt with the genocidal deaths of thou-
sands of Boer mothers and little children in the concentration camps
erected by Kitchener.
Nationalism in the United Kingdom was a real problem for the
Liberals, most damagingly in 1886 over Gladstone’s first bill for home
rule for Ireland. There were serious defections from Whigs like Lord
Hartington and the Liberal leader in Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain.
Henceforth Liberalism lacked a majority in England and Liberals were
increasingly dependent on their forces in Scotland and Wales, both of
whom spoke a language that sounded very much like home rule for their
nations also. Gladstone, their great unifier in 1818, was now their main
dividing force.
The most destructive threat of all for Liberals internationally was not
legal libertarians, nonconformists nor imperialists but the rise of labour.
The Liberal party was built on professional middle-class groups in urban
areas and free trade industrialists in the coal, cotton and shipbuilding
industries. The support of many working-class electors, especially noncon-
formists, popularly known as “Lib-Labs,” went to the party in large
numbers. It was very common for both Liberal coal-owners and miners’
agents to be staunch Liberals at election time (like D.A. Thomas and
“Mabon” in the Rhondda) but, with the growth of industrial conflict
and rising unemployment at the dawn of the twentieth century, many
working-class supporters peeled off, notably trade unionists who felt
threatened by laws on such matters as the right to strike which they felt
could be easily manipulated by the capitalist classes in the courts. Whig
reformers had ignored Chartism, Liberal employers followed suit in the
1880s, and the Liberal Party paid dearly for it. There was successful pres-
sure for working-class candidatures, as in the case of Keir Hardie who
won the industrial stronghold of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales. Glad-
stonian Liberalism in its purest form proved unstable in the early years
6 K. O. MORGAN

of the twentieth century. Other issues blended with industrial ones, such
as Ireland and anti-imperialism, and made working-class rebellion all the
more damaging.
By the early twentieth century, fundamental new themes were changing
public dialogue and debate. For one: British prosperity, based on Britain
being purportedly the workshop of the world. There was now serious
economic challenge to British primacy from Germany and the US. The
malign word “unemployment” entered the language. The doctrine of
Social Darwinism, seeking to apply scientific ideas of survival of the fittest
to the industrial world, became increasingly powerful, especially in the
Anglo-Saxon world.
Liberal ideas tottered under attacks from state collectivist ideas (from
social theorists like L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson, sociologists like
Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree and Leo Chiozza Money) and
inquiries into poverty, old age, ill-health (stimulated by reports on
the poor medical condition of recruits for the Boer War) and loss of
work. Gladstone’s individualist liberalism was mutating into a social New
Liberalism. These ideas were championed, under the governments of
Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith in 1905–1914, by Lloyd George who
became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Winston Churchill who was
made President of the Board of Trade and then Home Secretary. New
reforming programmes transformed the very idea of Liberalism—Old Age
Pensions, National Health and (in part) Labour Exchanges, school meals
for children, Unemployment Insurance, followed by subsidized council
housing and a much-expanded secondary education system. During the
First World War, alongside votes for women (initially, just those over 18),
what seemed to partisans a glorious high noon for British Liberalism
was, through Liberal intellectuals such as William Beveridge and C.F.G.
Masterman, to turn into a new Welfare State, largely the work of a new
democratic socialist Labour Party from 1906 onwards.
Perhaps the most important pioneering legislation was Lloyd George’s
National Insurance Act of 1911. It remained within the capitalist frame-
work which the Liberals wanted but it used the power of the central force.
It was, to a degree, redistributive and comprehensive. A vital preliminary
had been Lloyd George’s own “People’s Budget” of 1909 which laid the
new taxation base for the Act of 1911. It also, in constitutional terms,
was to deal an irreversible blow to the undemocratic legislative power of
the unelected House of Lords.
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 7

The New Liberalism did not, as we have seen, end with the First World
War. Christopher Addison’s post-war Housing Act of 1919 was an impor-
tant novelty. This legislation and the rise of the Labour Party as the major
anti-Conservative party of the left marked the end of old Liberal Party. It
was to be divided into fragments by unwise manoeuvres and party factions
headed by Lloyd George, into two by coalitions with the Tories in 1918,
into three by the further Tory-led coalition of 1931–1932, and further
squeezed by the austerity policies of the Cameron government of 2010–
2015. The old Gladstonian Liberalism was a casualty of total war. The
visionary gleam, the glory and the dream, had fled, seemingly for ever.

US Progressivism: Contacts, Conflicts


and Connections with British Liberalism
American historians saw Liberalism as the essential governing idea of the
US. It was truly a nation born free, a belief confirmed by the victory of
the anti-slavery North in the civil war. Disappointment with the results
of the war, especially in the conquered South, led to protests in agrarian
regions of America in the south and west and formation of the Populist
Party, with William Jennings Bryan as its presidential candidate in 1896.
The radicalism and longer-term influence of both Bryan and his party
have often been under-estimated by historians in the north-east. But
they were at variance with industrial America and the dominance of the
so-called “robber barons” of big business. Also, their economic views—
based on “free silver” currency in place of the gold standard—were
widely thought to be unrealistic and eccentric. But the Progressive move-
ment in nation, state and city achieved an influence that the Populists
could never manage. Its climax was the presidential contest in 1912
between Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive Republican) and Woodrow
Wilson (Democratic). For a time, Progressive reform seemed the domi-
nant creed. But, like Liberalism and the Liberal Party in Great Britain, it
was killed off by the imperatives of the First World War.
Progressivism shared some of its targets with British Liberalism:
“robber barons” and landlords, fear of the cities, the disruptive effects
of mass immigration, anxieties aroused by American imperialism after the
1898 war with Spain, the “muckraking” tactics of exposure in popular
newspapers and journals, not to mention the crusading message of influ-
ential novels by authors such as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, a
socialist. But of course, they were expressed in different ways and through
8 K. O. MORGAN

different institutions. British Liberalism expressed itself mainly through


parliament and national protest. In the US, Progressives usually led the
way through the cities, and through liberal writers such as Frederick
Howe, reforming mayors such as the Welsh American “Golden Rule”
Jones in Toledo, Ohio and some radical senators and governors such
as “Fighting Bob” La Follette in Wisconsin. There were also influential
professionals—journalists, lawyers (importantly, Louis D. Brandeis, later
to serve as a judge on the Supreme Court), university teachers (notably
in the university of Wisconsin). Another important group, who reached
perhaps the climax of their influence, were those involved in Theodore
Roosevelt’s reforming impulse (social reform at home, a robust foreign
policy and a larger navy) in 1912, anxious not to abolish the trusts entirely
but to liberalize capitalism from within.
Some of the Progressives were Democrats, some Republicans, some of
no particular party. Their objectives became clearer over the passage of
time, most resoundingly so just before the First World War and America’s
entry into it, which saw Woodrow Wilson elected in 1916 as President.
An important theme was the social justice movement to observe and
work with the poor in the cities, as with Toynbee Hall in the East
End of London and Hull House founded by a remarkable woman, Jane
Addams in the south side of Chicago. A literary example of this movement
appeared when Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle (1906), was published
although, unfortunately, it didn’t hit its intended target. The Jungle aimed
to arouse the national conscience at the working conditions of immi-
grant workers in the meat factories in Chicago, but instead it stirred
consumerist passions amongst middle-class people at the lack of hygiene
in the production of food in Chicago’s factories. Sinclair ruefully observed
that he “aimed at the public’s heart and hit its stomach” by prioritizing
the bourgeois consumer rather than the working-class producer. Many
progressive social radicals came from the Protestant churches—like the
aforementioned, socially conscious Christian Addams, and the Danish
investigator, Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives. American
politics seemed to shift to the left, but the prevalent capitalist ethic steered
the people clear of socialism. In the 1912 election, the Socialist candidate,
Eugene Victor Debs, won a million votes, but no more, unlike the now
growing Labour Party in Britain, partly because of the distance between
the Socialist Party and leading trade unionists like Sam Gompers who
declared “What does Labor want? More!” The most successful Socialist
state in 1912 was rural Oklahoma. Progressives sought reform within the
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 9

capitalist system. Ludicrously, in 2022, Joe Biden was accused of being a


socialist.
Then, there was the anti-trust movement. Theodore Roosevelt was
unusual in linking his views with social reform. La Follette pressed on with
unemployment, pensions and workers’ compensation. The trusts suffered
some key defeats in the courts, as did Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, but that
giant enterprise was able to fight back successfully in the 1920s. The anti-
trust laws were used with some success, not against big business but the
labour unions.
Thirdly, there was the more typically American theme of Direct
Democracy. There was widespread concern that grass-roots party poli-
tics were being taken over in the cities by corrupt machines in league
with the “robber barons.” This was especially true of the reconstructed
southern states after the civil war. Hence demands for a more honest,
open, transparent politics: direct primaries for choosing party candidates,
the referendum, the initiative and the recall of judges. As a by-product,
votes for women made more rapid progress in the US than in the UK
where the suffragettes’ campaign for “votes for women” met with more
resistance from white males. The Progressive movement had a strongly
ethical, even religious, aspect. It was symbolized by Jane Addams at the
Progressive convention in 1912 singing “Onwards Christian Soldiers.” It
was governed by a deep faith in the honesty of ordinary people if they
were left untrammelled by the corrupt influence of the party bosses, such
as in Tammany Hall in New York City. This belief in the simple prin-
ciples of the citizenry, dating back to the tenets of Thoreau and earlier
philosophers—sometimes with an opposite principle—was based on the
need for government to be transformed and purified by an impartial,
disinterested civil service. One of the differences with British Liberalism,
however, was the lesser concern with constitutional reform, at the state
and city level. Even the British Labour Party, like the Chartists before
it, aimed at the capture of power for workers through franchise and elec-
toral reform, that is many more workers becoming MPs until government
itself was captured and a people’s commonwealth was established on firm
foundations.
What did the liberals in the US Progressive movement achieve? They
had their clear limitations. They were strongly composed of white middle-
class professional people of conscience. They largely ignored race issues
from Reconstruction down to the Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first
century. Little was done about the mistreatment of Black Americans at the
10 K. O. MORGAN

hands of the police even in apparently liberal areas such as Minneapolis


in 2021. Woodrow Wilson, a leading progressive, was a Southerner from
Virginia who introduced the colour bar into the staff of the White House.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did little for America’s coloured people,
by now in the most thickly congregated areas in northern cities as in
Philadelphia and Chicago’s south side. Again, it did little for the “small
man”; in the great plains of the Mid-West small farmers were commonly
crushed by “agribusiness” under the New Deal’s Triple A programmes
for the farms.
The long-term outcome of British Liberalism was the welfare equality
and redistributive finance of Attlee’s Labour government after 1945.
In the US, moves towards greater equality were feared as the hated
“socialism,” and progress was sparse.
But this was not wholly true. Liberalism in Britain and the US was
closer than between America and other European states. In the Anglo-
Saxon, anglophone world, what was happening in the US Progressive
movement found its inspiration in Europe, Britain in particular. There
was a close political connection between Britain and the US, and between
Theodore Roosevelt and Lloyd George in particular; the Welshman found
the prickly academic conservatism of Woodrow Wilson far less appealing,
as explained in his memoirs of the 1919 Peace conference when the news
of Roosevelt’s death came through. Lloyd George would have made a
strong Progressive, with his support for social reform and a bold foreign
policy.
Much of British liberalism inspired many of the US Progressives. The
Social Justice movement was greatly influenced by contemporary develop-
ments in Britain—Jane Addams in Hull House followed the social work
of Toynbee Hall in the East End of London; adult education in the US
followed Ruskin College in Oxford, itself founded by an American, Walter
Vrooman to assist able young trade unionists; American business initia-
tives followed corporate controls on business in Britain during the First
World War. The US was also much influenced by such innovations as
the growth of “municipal socialism” in German and British local govern-
ment (as in Birmingham and Glasgow), Swiss developments in federal
government and Scandinavian progress in cooperative agriculture. Amer-
ican observers were also much excited by the ideas on design and planning
on display in the Paris Expo of 1900.
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 11

Conclusion
There was important exchange in economic, social and cultural matters
between European and US liberals, especially between the end of the
US civil war and the end of the First World War, when Progressivism
was swamped by pre-crash business irresponsibility and the right-wing
currents of the post-war “red scare” after the Russian Revolution. The
Anglo-American sympathies worried some Americans who suspected the
effect on their people’s democracy of the borrowings from the UK
social elite and the European class system (not to mention British and
Scandinavian monarchies). They especially feared the impact of the perni-
cious seduction of Empire (though America itself ended up with imperial
possessions in the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico after the defeat
of Spain, and control over the Panama Canal). It worried liberals like
Herbert Croly that an American progressive journal like The Outlook
admired the intellectual leadership it saw in the quads and cloisters of
Oxford and Cambridge.
What must be remembered is that these dynamic decades between
1832 and 1945 did witness a kind of “special relationship” across the
ocean. But this “special relationship” was based on soft power and much
of it was “made in Britain” unlike the situation today.
CHAPTER 2

The Intellectual Roots of Neoliberalism:


Advocating for a New Paradigm
(1945–1979)

Stéphane Porion and Sébastien Mort

No one can say that this doctrine will triumph. One can only say that
it is many ways ideally suited to fill the vacuum that seems to me to
be developing in the beliefs of intellectual classes the world over. Neo-
liberalism would accept the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis on the
fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for
the nineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the
goal of the competitive order. It would seek to use competition among
producers to protect consumers from exploitation, competition among
employers to protect workers and owners of property, and competition
among consumers to protect the enterprises themselves. The state would

S. Porion (B)
University of Tours, Tours, France
e-mail: stephane.porion@univ-tours.fr
S. Mort
American Studies, University of Lorraine, Metz, France
e-mail: sebastien.mort@univ-lorraine.fr

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13


Switzerland AG 2022
N. Lévy et al. (eds.), The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12074-9_2
14 S. PORION AND S. MORT

police the system, establish conditions favourable to competition and


prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute
misery and distress. The citizens would be protected against the state by
the existence of a free private market; and against one another by the
preservation of competition (Friedman, 1951).

Overview of the Post-War Economic Order: The


Emergence of a New Intellectual Paradigm
After World War II, the functions and role of the state, as well as interna-
tional relations, were restructured to avoid a return to the catastrophic
and miserable conditions of the 1930s, when the Great Depression
revealed the moral decline of liberal principles and undermined the
capitalist order. The war had legitimized the increase in state interven-
tion in the economy and industrial policy meaning that, in peacetime,
the state should guarantee full employment, economic growth, fairer
social policies (with the setting up of the Welfare state or implemen-
tation of welfare programmes) and pursue fiscal and monetary policies
deemed “Keynesian” to avoid further slumps. Internationally, through
the Bretton Woods agreements and the creation of several institutions
(e.g. the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF), a new world
order was established to secure stability. As Harvey (2005: 11) puts it,
“this form of political-economic organization is now usually referred to as
‘embedded liberalism’ to signal how market processes and entrepreneurial
and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and polit-
ical constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained
but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy.
State-led planning and in some instances state ownership of key sectors
(coal, steel, automobiles) were not uncommon (for example in Britain,
France and Italy).” In the 1950s and 1960s, “embedded liberalism”—
the bedrock of Britain’s “post-war consensus” and America’s “liberal
consensus”—fostered economic growth in advanced capitalist countries.
At the turn of the 1970s, in a context of stagflation, this package
of Keynesian policies and “embedded liberalism” began to crumble and
proved ineffective in curbing rising inflation and unemployment, and in
addressing lagging growth and the rising costs of welfare state systems.
Various international crises, such as the abandonment of fixed exchange
rates in 1971 and the 1973 global oil crisis, embodied the demise
of such a paradigm and put an end to the narrative of the post-war
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 15

affluent/golden years. In the case of Britain, it went as far as it had to be


bailed out by the IMF in 1976, which confirmed the country’s reputation
of being “the sick man of Europe.”
The development of the neoliberal paradigm before the implemen-
tation of Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the 1980s should also be
analysed through the lens of the Cold War and the radicalization of
ideological struggles in the 1970s (capitalism vs communism). Audard
(2009: 343) points out that two main factors account for the success
of “New Right” ideas by the turn of the 1980s. Firstly, the intellectual
framework had already been developed and neoliberal ideas and principles
were ready to be implemented and converted into policies. In addition,
through some major publications, such as The Road to Serfdom (1944)
or The Constitution of Liberty (1960), and his role at the Mont Pelerin
Society, Hayek had promoted a paradigm-shift designed as a credible
alternative to socialism and conservatism that would solve the political and
economic predicaments of the 1970s. In both Britain and the US, “the
malaise was generally perceived to comprise three separate but distinctly
related aspects: a crisis of economic standing, a crisis of international and
security standing and a crisis of executive performance and political insti-
tutions” (Adonis & Hames, 1994: 4). In Britain in particular, Thatcher
constructed a narrative of the crisis imbued with declinism, a strategy
designed to push forward this new set of alternative ideas as a cure to
Britain’s relative decline.
Secondly, in terms of agency, there was a whole army of political
leaders, scholars, CEOs, senior civil servants, technocrats, and economists,
who would promote this new intellectual paradigm. Some had actually
been playing a significant role in emerging think tanks (e.g. in Britain, the
Institute of Economic Affairs set up in 1955, the Centre of Policy Studies
co-founded by Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman in 1974, and the Adam
Smith Institute created in 1977; in the US, the Hoover Institution set up
in 1919, the American Enterprise Institute created in 1943, and Heritage
set up in 1973). As Cooper (2012: 5) underscores, “the think tanks were
successful in developing and promoting New Right policies; Thatcher
and Reagan therefore ‘plugged into a network that already existed.’”
He (Cooper, 2012: 24) also adds that “think tanks did contribute to
the broad agendas of the administrations due to their increased media
presence after the mid-1970s and gave some legitimacy to the policies
pursued by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations while simultane-
ously, arguably largely retroactively, creating a sense that there had been
16 S. PORION AND S. MORT

‘a great movement of ideas’ in Britain and America.” The proliferation


of free market/conservative think tanks in both countries sheds light on
both the dissemination process of neoliberal ideas since the 1970s and a
variety of transatlantic transfers (intellectual, policy, and tactical).

Historical Perspective of Neoliberalism


As Plehwe and Mirowski (2009: 10) argue, “both the term and concept
of neoliberalism enjoyed a long prehistory in twentieth-century political
and economic thought.” Examining the history of neoliberalism, Stedman
Jones (2012: 6–8) identifies three distinct phases. The first one spanned
from the 1920s until about 1950. The term “neoliberalism” started to
emerge in inter-war Europe, and it was through the platform of the
Mont Pelerin Society that such an ideology was further developed. The
second stage of neoliberalism lasted from 1950 until the ascendency,
in the 1980s, of Thatcher and Reagan who promoted the gospel of a
revitalized free market ideology. A third phase of neoliberalism opened
after 1980, when an agenda of “market liberalization” and “fiscal disci-
pline” underpinned the development of trade and economic policy. In
this vein, Freeden (2003: 127) contends that “sometimes ideologies take
decades and even longer, to emerge in force—the 20th-century genre
of neo-liberalism, for instance, germinated from the 1940s until it flow-
ered in the 1980s.” In this preamble, we briefly focus on the first two
abovementioned phases.
Firstly, the word neoliberalism in its modern outlook was used for
the first time in Swiss economist Hans Honegger’s 1925 book Trends
of Economic Ideas. Honegger focused on “theoretical neoliberalism”
as a doctrine based on competition and entrepreneurship, fending off
burgeoning socialist ideas and bolshevism. However, the role of the state
was conceived negatively, a testament to the enduring legacy of classical
liberalism and its foundational idea of minimal state interference in the
economy (Steger & Roy, 2021: xvi). Viennese sociologist Leopold von
Wiese and Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises took part in intellectual
debates by further questioning the ideas of liberalism and looking for new
approaches. Plehwe and Mirowski (2009: 11) thus contend that “interwar
Vienna presaged certain neoliberal ideas and proto-Mont- Pèlerin Society
structures. In particular, it fostered the creation of a certain kind of extra-
academic cosmopolitan intellectual formation,” which benefited Hayek
and Lionel Robbins for example, who would both become paramount
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 17

members of the Mont Pelerin Society. According to Cockett (1994: 21),


“the ‘Austrian School’ of economics began to attract considerable atten-
tion, for it provided a trenchant critique of Socialism and an equally
robust defence of economic liberalism. The traditional home of liberalism,
Britain, turned to Austria to reinvigorate the philosophical position of
liberalism at home.”
In the following decade, the term neoliberalism began to be used
in different contexts and countries (e.g. France, Germany) establishing
itself as “the main designation of a new intellectual/political movement”
(Plehwe & Mirowski, 2009: 12). A critical warning against the worldwide
advance of collectivist ideas and governments since World War I, Walter
Lippmann’s 1937 book The Good Society led to a colloquium held in Paris
the following year (26 August), which would become a milestone in the
emergence of the neoliberal intellectual movement. For Lippman (1937:
267), the role of the state had to be reconsidered to avoid unjustified state
interference: “In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of
men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”
All the participants in the colloquium acknowledged that liberalism had
become an unpopular discredited doctrine and sought to offer a new,
revitalized interpretation of liberalism. As a result, the term neoliberalism
was chosen to suggest that “it would be more than a simple return to
laissez-faire economics and instead reformulate liberalism to address the
concerns of the 1930s” (Stedman Jones, 2012: 6). According to Cahill
and Konings (2017:15), “neoliberal doctrine originated in the rethinking
of capitalism’s foundations in a context where classic liberalism could no
longer readily claim the mantle of historical progress. As an intellectual
project, neoliberal thought can be viewed as an attempt to reformu-
late the principles of classic liberalism at a time when the latter had lost
much of its legitimacy.” In this closing speech, Rougier suggested that the
Centre International d’Études pour la renovation du Libéralisme should
be set up. Cockett (1994: 12) stresses that the “twenty-six academics,
intellectuals, journalists and others returned to their own countries at the
beginning of September, with Lippman, Hayek and Röpke, charged with
founding American, British and Swiss sections of the new organization.”
Although World War II cut this project short, it is worth highlighting the
strong determination of this emerging intellectual movement to launch a
counter-revolution against collectivist and Keynesian ideas and organize
branches in various countries to spread the neoliberal gospel.
18 S. PORION AND S. MORT

Yet, some French scholars have disputed Cockett’s notion that a


consensus had emerged during the Lippman Colloquium over the new
“Magna Carta of Liberalism” presented by Rougier (quoted in Cockett
1994: 12), pointing out the significant disagreements among the partic-
ipants over how to go beyond the ideological principles of classical
liberalism, given their heterogeneity and countries of origin. Contending
that contexts of reception matter, Audier (2012: 71) dismisses the idea
that there was strict convergence between Lippman’s ideas and those of
French Liberals, and more generally with those of international partici-
pants. As for Audard (2009: 345–346), fault lines were in fact unveiled
between those who remained in agreement with classical liberalism and
those, like ordo-liberalism advocates, who thought that classical liberalism
had caused the 1930s slump and thus needed revamping. Therefore, while
having come short of delineating precise contours for neoliberalism, the
participants nonetheless agreed that liberalism should be reconsidered.
In early April 1947, thirty-six scholars, mostly economists, with some
historians and philosophers, were invited by Hayek to meet at Mont-
Pèlerin in Switzerland to discuss the state and possible fate of classical
liberalism in theory and practice. They hoped to strengthen the princi-
ples and practice of a free society and to study the workings, virtues, and
weaknesses of market-oriented economic systems (www.montpelerin.org/
about-mps). Hartwell (1995: xiv–xvi) depicts the creation of the Mont
Pelerin Society (MPS) as “a true academy of intellectuals” and “an inter-
national association of scholars” “to educate the intellectuals and to lay
the intellectual foundation of a liberal society and economy.” Hayek’s
goal was to take part in the battle of ideas against socialism and collec-
tivism and to convert the next generation of intellectuals, politicians, and
economists to a new creed of revitalized liberalism. To achieve this goal,
he thought that three main intellectual centres (The London School of
Economics, Chicago and Vienna), whose influence was reflected in the
composition of the MPS, should work towards reviving contemporary
economic liberal thought (Cockett, 1994: 104–109). The role of the
MPS was thus essential in the development of neoliberal ideas: “although
neoliberalism comes in several varieties, one can find an early systematic
formulation of its economic principles in the philosophical ethos of the
Mont Pèlerin Society” (Steger & Roy, 2021: 15–16).
Milton Friedman’s essay “Neo-liberalism and its Prospects” (1951),
quoted in the epigraph of this preamble, is reminiscent of the MPS’ influ-
ence. The author attempts to define what neoliberalism can mean in a
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 19

post-war world. According to Stedman Jones (2012: 6–7), “though little


noticed and in many ways oddly unrepresentative of his thought, Fried-
man’s article can be seen in retrospect as an important bridge between
the first and the second phases of neoliberalism, between the concerns
of the pre-dominantly European founding figures, located in Austria,
London, Manchester, France, Switzerland, and parts of Germany, and
a subsequent generation of thinkers, mainly though by no means all
American, located especially in Chicago and Virginia.” What should be
highlighted here is that in the early 1950s, Friedman and Hayek shared
the same view regarding the proper role of the state. As time went
by, Friedman’s view gradually changed: he started to call for a much
more consistently rigorous laissez-faire view identifying only three areas
of the economy in which state intervention is legitimate. Therefore, while
Hayek believed it was not the volume but the nature of state activity
that would define a neoliberal system, Friedman thought that both vari-
ables mattered. Cahill and Konings (2017: 29) shrewdly point out that
“these positions can be seen as providing the coordinates within which
neoliberal thought and practice have moved.” One should be sceptical
of the idea that the development of neoliberalism suffered from intellec-
tual inconsistency. On the contrary, its political strength stemmed from
its flexibility. The same authors Cahill and Konings (2017: 30) add that
“over time, the neoliberal thought collective came to solidify around
three dominant intellectual influences: Austrian economics, the Chicago
School, and public choice theory. Again, while there was congruence
between the three, in aggregate they also contributed to a certain flex-
ibility and malleability to neoliberal doctrine.” It is important to bear in
mind that neoliberal policies were supported by disparate figures as there
were “several neoliberalisms,” suggesting that any attempt at reaching a
single definition of the concept proved a challenging endeavour from the
start (Stedman Jones, 2012: 17). Along with its inherent doctrinal diver-
sity, also paramount is neoliberalism’s transatlantic nature, a phenomenon
particularly visible in the ideological cross-pollination and transfers that
took place in the second half of the 1970s.
20 S. PORION AND S. MORT

Adapting the American Model of Neoliberal Advocacy in 1970s Britain


The Heritage Foundation and the Adam Smith Institute, two conservative
think tanks working towards influencing the agendas of their countries’
respective administration and government, represent a meaningful prece-
dent of such ideological transfers between the US and the UK. Starting
in the mid-1970s, the relationship between these two organizations illus-
trates how, through private initiative, neoliberal ideas were transferred
and adapted to shape, legitimize, and disseminate a new body of political
doctrine.
The first British think tank of its kind, the Adam Smith Institute was
established in 1977 by Madsen Pirie and the brothers Eamonn and Stuart
Butler, three former graduates from Saint Andrews University and avid
readers of Adam Smith, Friedman, Hayek, and Karl Kopper. These intel-
lectuals had a determining influence on Pirie and the Butler brothers’ own
philosophic thinking, which emphasizes the primacy of individual initia-
tive, reverence for an unfettered free market, and the systematic transfer
of services traditionally managed by the state to the private sector as a
way to optimize results.
When the Saint Andrews Three created the Adam Smith Institute, they
modelled it, in part, on the Heritage Foundation, which had been created
four years before. In that respect, the history of the Institute offers an
interesting vantage point from which to examine transatlantic transfers of
conservative expertise, all the more so since, at different moments in the
early 1970s, its founders were immersed in US conservative circles and
participated in the nascent networks of conservative advocacy that were
coalescing under the banner of the New Right.
The Saint Andrews Three therefore interacted closely with the movers
and shakers of the emerging ecosystem of US conservative advocacy and
witnessed first-hand the creation of the foundations, think tanks, and
congressional groups that were to form the bedrock of the new conser-
vative establishment. In the process, they learnt the ropes of the trade,
acquiring skills and know-how they later astutely implemented as they set
up their own think tank at the heart of the UK power centre. “We actu-
ally felt reasonably confident,” Stuart indicates, “that, taking the lessons
we learned from the United States organizationally and some of the ideas,
that we could actually make a go of it in the UK” (Mort’s interview with
Butler, June 13, 2014).
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 21

Heritage and the Institute indeed share intriguing resemblance. As


organizations dedicated to the promotion of an unfettered free-market,
economic laissez-faire, limited state intervention, and deregulation, both
seek to influence the political process through concrete policy recom-
mendations designed to move the country in a conservative direction,
particularly by privatizing a whole host of state-operated services. These
ready-to-implement proposals focused on areas such as taxation, housing,
education, or urban renewal and were set forth in a series of blueprints.
In January 1981, Heritage published the first instalment of its Mandate
for Leadership, while between November 1983 and November 1985, the
Adam Smith Institute issued 15 or so Omega Papers.
At various degrees, both organizations have exerted significant influ-
ence on the politics of their respective countries. The Reagan administra-
tion implemented a significant number of the measures presented in the
Mandate reports, and Heritage officials were appointed to government
positions. In the same way, the Institute’s founders had close relation-
ships with some Ministers and Cabinet members of Thatcher’s second
ministry, some of whom had participated in Omega Project committees.
The products of transatlantic ideological cross-pollination, the
Heritage Foundation and the Adam Smith Institute appear as conserva-
tive transatlantic twins, operating in seemingly similar ways and wielding
comparable influence on their countries’ politics. The Institute, in partic-
ular, seems to result from an attempt at importing the Heritage model,
even though the significant political and cultural differences that exist
between the US and the UK precluded the possibility for the Institute’s
founders to replicate the model identically.
Focused on formulating and actively disseminating very concrete,
detailed policy recommendations, Heritage played a crucial role in paving
the way for a conservative Republican president, whose administration’s
policy orientation it would later influence significantly. In doing so, it
adopted a different approach from the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), an organization “dedicated to the preservation of the American
free enterprise system” (Bowman, 2006: 25) which tended to address
issues from an academic perspective.
In addition to Heritage and the network of philanthropic founda-
tions that funded policy and advocacy initiatives, Washington conservative
operatives also approached the second half of the 1970s equipped with the
Republican Study Committee, a congressional group funded by academic
and congressional aide Edwin J. Feulner dedicated to the promotion of a
22 S. PORION AND S. MORT

conservative hard line among House Republicans, and the Committee for
the Survival of a Free Congress, a political action committee focused on
winnowing out moderate Republicans by providing financial support to
first-time conservative hardliners in primary and general elections. Thanks
to their timely migration to the US and their encounter with Feulner,
Pirie and the Butler brothers were the prime witnesses to the emergence
of this new conservative apparatus, making the most of this foundational
moment in the history of the US conservative movement.
To Pirie and the Butler brothers, the early 1970s US seemed much
more welcoming to libertarian principles, especially to think tanks and
political organizations, than the UK—private initiative was steering the
national political agenda from outside the sphere of Washington elected
officials and efforts to reconquer political power were already underway.
“We had seen how vigorous was the drive for self-improvement in
the US,” Pirie recollects, “and we had seen how US pressure groups
and research organizations strove to create conditions under which to
flourish” (Pirie, 2012: 4).
Upon returning to the UK in the spring of 1976, Pirie and Stuart
set out to establish their own think tank, using Heritage as a template
they sought to replicate, both in terms of its role as policy incubator and
the way it was funded. What they envisioned was for the Institute to be
to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) what Heritage had been to
AEI—an entity that would turn political principles into concrete, imple-
mentable policy. “The IEA,” Pirie argues, “aimed to produce booklets,
monographs that would go into the economics libraries of universities
and change the way economists thought about the British economy—we
didn’t want to do that, we wanted to change policy” (Mort’s interview
with Pirie, July 9, 2014). Heritage’s influence was key in that respect as it
provided a roadmap to move beyond abstract concepts of political philos-
ophy, positioning itself as “a new kind of think tank (…) truly bridging
the academic community with the very practical political legislative poli-
tics and party politics,” Stuart notes (Mort’s interview with Butler, June
13, 2014). The Institute’s mission was therefore to operate as a power-
house of libertarian policy proposals, working in synergy with IEA, not
in competition with it. “What we did,” Stuart goes on to explain, “was
to kind of take the IEA papers and think about them and say, ‘OK, now
how would we apply this in a very practical way?’ and that was kind of
what Heritage had taught us to do” (Mort’s interview with Butler, June
13, 2014).
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 23

While Heritage offered a playbook to bridge the gap between academic


thinking and concrete policy, its economic model proved impossible to
replicate in a British context: there was no tradition of private philan-
thropy, no tradition of wealthy donors supporting private initiatives, and
a particularly unfavourable tax code, which made the struggle to raise
funds constant. “Funding is always a problem for British think tanks, it
still is,” Pirie laments (Mort’s interview with Pirie, July 9, 2014). As for
US foundations, they refused to sponsor projects outside the country and
turned out their demands for funding.
To overcome these obstacles, and following a trend that was emerging
in the early 1970s, Pirie and Stuart started by establishing the “Adam
Smith University,” a summer academic programme designed to raise
money to fund the future institute, and created the International Univer-
sity of the Open Society, a one-week symposium aimed at the young
generations of free-market thinkers and designed to promote the ideas
of liberal economists like Hayek and Popper.
Later registered as a US corporation in Virginia, the Adam Smith Insti-
tute opened in August 1977 both as a summer school and a research
unit. Its board was set up in a way designed to establish its legitimacy
in the academic world and give credibility to its publications. Among
the important personalities involved in the creation of the Institute was
the Mont Pelerin Society’s founder and fellow of the British Academy
Friedrich Hayek, who joined as Chairman of the Board of Scholars. An
active supporter of the Institute, Hayek recommended enlisting the help
of Sir Anthony Fisher, the founder of IEA, and of Bob Bee, an American
banker carrying out business in London, which conferred added gravitas
to the Institute.
Despite similarities, Heritage and the Institute are in fact very different
in the way they were established, funded, and operated. The specific
British economic and political contexts of the 1970s imposed significant
hurdles as the Saint Andrews Three endeavoured to follow the Heritage
playbook. Heritage’s influence over the Institute was mostly logistical and
organisational in nature, as it provided a business model that the latter
adapted to the particularities of UK conservative advocacy’s economics.
The model was therefore not replicated but adapted to create a specifically
British model of think tank.
24 S. PORION AND S. MORT

Towards a Conservative Revolution?


Before exploring the development of the Anglo-American neoliberal
paradigm and its dissemination since the 1980s in the present book,
there remains one question that deserves our attention: is it relevant to
depict the intellectual upheaval at the turn of the 1980s as a “conser-
vative revolution?” This issue was addressed in Adonis & Hames’ 1994
seminal book. According to the authors, this label is “problematic” for
different reasons, while, in Cooper’s view (2012: 18), “the term ‘Conser-
vative revolution’ is identified to varying degrees in Britain and America.”
First, Thatcher and Reagan were not presented by their internal party
opponents as true conservatives: the ideological twins’ “emphasis on free
markets makes them old-style liberals rather than true conservatives”
(Adonis & Hames, 1994: 249). Secondly, they were not seen as having
invented anything new but “drew on traditions of limited government
and market capitalism which dated back a century and more on both sides
of the Atlantic” (Adonis & Hames, 1994: 249). In her speeches, Thatcher
would indeed refer with nostalgia to Britain’s glorious past when champi-
oning free trade policies: “What kind of people are we? We are the people
that in the past made Great Britain the workshop of the world, the people
who persuaded others to buy British, not by begging them to do so but
because it was best. (…) Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work
as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the State as
servant and not as master—these are the British inheritance. They are the
essence of a free country. (…) We want a free economy, not only because
it guarantees our liberties, but also because it is the best way of creating
wealth and prosperity for the whole country” (Thatcher, 1975).
In the late 1970s in Britain, the Conservative Party was thus “high-
jacked by the economic liberals” (Cockett, 1994: 327), gradually making
the free-market Thatcherite faction dominant within the party. Yet, oppo-
nents to Thatcher’s and Reagan’s neoliberal ideas would derogatorily
depict them as “paleoliberals” (Lagueux, 2010: 367)—that is, merely
promoting a return to nineteenth-century classical liberal policies. What
Thatcher and Reagan did in fact was “to give policy flesh to the market-
liberal skeleton” (Adonis & Hames, 1994: 250). For Cockett, “the
doctrine of ‘economic liberalism’ made ‘Thatcherism’ distinct and enabled
her governments to embark on what many regarded as a revolution in the
‘political economy’ of the country itself” (Cockett, 1994: 3). It might
then be preferable to refer to “the economic liberal revolution of the
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 25

1980s” (Cockett, 1994: 333) and call this revolution “a political revo-
lution” (Cahill & Konings, 2017: 16) or a “neoliberal revolution” (e.g.
Audard, 2009: 336–400; Cahill & Konings, 2017: 26; Steger & Roy,
2021: 24, 31) instead of a “conservative revolution.”

References
Adonis, A., & Hames, T. (Eds.) (1994). A conservative revolution? The Thatcher-
Reagan decade in perspective. MUP.
Audard, C. (2009). Qu’est que le libéralisme? Éthique, politique, société. Gallimard.
Audier, S. (2012). Néo-libéralisme(s): une archéologie intellectuelle. Grasset &
Fasquelle.
Bowman, C. (2006). American Enterprise Institute. In B. Frohnen, J. Beer, &
J. O. Nelson (Eds.), American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (p.25–26). ISI
Books.
Cahill, D., & Konings, M. (2017). Neoliberalism. Polity Press.
Cockett, R. (1994). Thinking the unthinkable: Think-tanks and the economic
counter-revolution 1931–1983. HarperCollins.
Cooper, J. (2012). Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: A very political
special relationship. Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Hartwell, R. M. (1995). A history of the Mont-Pelerin Society. Liberty Fund.
Freeden, M. (2003). Ideology: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Friedman, M. (1951 February). Neo-liberalism and its prospects, Farmand, 89–
93. https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Friedm
anM-Neo-liberalism-02.17.1951.pdf
Lagueux, M. (2010). Libéralisme et néolibéralisme. In G. Kévorkian (Ed.), La
Pensée libérale : histoire et controverses (pp. 357–377). Ellipses.
Lippmann, W. (1937). An inquiry into the principles of a good society. Little,
Brown and Co.
Mort, S. (2014). Interview with Butler, June 13. Mont Pelerin Society, www.
montpelerin.org/about-mps
Mort, S. (2014). Interview with Pirie, July 9.
Pirie, M. (2012). Think tank: The history of the Adam Smith institute. Biteback
Publishing.
Plehwe, D., & Mirowski, P. (Eds.). (2009). The road from Mont Pelerin. Harvard
University Press.
Stedman Jones, D. (2012). Masters of the universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the
birth of neoliberal politics. Princeton University Press.
26 S. PORION AND S. MORT

Steger, M. B., & Roy, R. K. (2021). Neoliberalism: A very short introduction.


OUP.
Thatcher, M. (1975). Speech to conservative party conference, 10 October,
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102777
CHAPTER 3

Introduction

Nathalie A. Champroux, Alexis Chommeloux,


and Stéphane Porion

4 May 2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of Thatcher’s first coming to


power and the beginning of what is still presented as the Anglo-American
neoliberal turning point. Since the twenty-first century, several scholars
of neoliberalism have studied its development and expansion through a
historical perspective, identifying distinct phases (e.g., Cahill & Konings,
2017; Saad-Fillho, 2021; Stedman Jones, 2012; Steger & Roy, 2021).
The first wave admittedly took place in the 1980s, when both Thatcher
and Reagan, preceded by US Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker and his
drastic change in monetary policy, brought about a “neoliberal policy
revolution,” causing the radical “dismantle of the post-war economic

N. A. Champroux (B) · A. Chommeloux · S. Porion


University of Tours, Tours, France
e-mail: nathalie.champroux@univ-tours.fr
A. Chommeloux
e-mail: alexis.chommeloux@univ-tours.fr
S. Porion
e-mail: stephane.porion@univ-tours.fr

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27


Switzerland AG 2022
N. Lévy et al. (eds.), The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12074-9_3
28 N. A. CHAMPROUX ET AL.

order” epitomised by Keynesian consensus policies, big government, and


the welfare state (Cahill & Konings, 2017: 2). As Harvey (2005: 2) puts
it, “Volcker, Reagan, and Thatcher all took minority arguments that had
long been in circulation and made them majoritarian” by extolling the
virtues of revived free markets, rolling back the frontiers of the state, and
profoundly transforming politics with a new paradigm of economic poli-
cymaking. Although “the two countries’ experience of neoliberalism was
not homogeneous and its effect was mediated by the countries’ political,
social and cultural structures,” (Dolowitz et al., 1999: 527) the ideolog-
ical twins’ ideas were to become political orthodoxy and neoliberalism “a
mode of hegemonic discourse.” (Cahill & Konings, 2017: 3).
Neoliberalism has since survived many deaths. The crises of the last
thirty years (the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2007–2008 Global
Financial Crisis, the victories of Brexit and Trump in 2016) have under-
mined neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, leading its obitu-
arists to recurrently pronounce its death. Movements of resistance (e.g.,
Occupy) have emerged to delegitimise neoliberalism and envision alter-
natives. Yet, Cahill and Konings (2017: 50) note that “through these
movements, the term ‘neoliberal’ gained much greater currency as the
descriptor of what was being opposed.” After losing another of its lives
during each crisis, neoliberalism has survived like a “zombie” (Crouch,
2011; Plehwe et al., 2020: 2) or, for some, like “a cat having nine lives,”
(Peck, 2010, 2012; Plehwe et al., 2020: 2) prompting Crouch (2011)
to evoke “the strange non-death of Neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism has
enjoyed longevity thanks to its institutional embeddedness and capacity
for readjustments. According to Plehwe et al. (2020: 2, 11), “there are
two ways of making sense of its longevity: the durability of the block
of capital and their allies in government and the expansion and adapta-
tion of neoliberal worldviews encroaching upon the competing ideologies
of conservatism and social democratic liberalism,” despite “the percep-
tions of its eternal crisis.” Steger and Roy (2021: 127) support this view,
underscoring how it skilfully “adapt(s) to specific contexts and react(s) to
particular crises and opportunities.”
Today, the successive financial and COVID-19 pandemic crises have
caused world leaders to consider and implement policies that were very
recently deemed unorthodox and have led some to call into question the
cogency of what had established itself as a “neoliberal model.” President
Biden is sometimes referred to as “the New Roosevelt,” a reference to
times when the very definition of US liberalism changed with the “New
3 INTRODUCTION 29

Deal Liberalism,” which questions the validity, usefulness stability of its


prefixed avatar, i.e., “neoliberalism.” Avatars of “neoliberalism” have, in
an unprecedented manner, become wholly dissociated from “liberalism”
with the emergence of what some refer to as “illiberalism.” We therefore
believe that a fresh perspective is justified.
It now seems relevant to carry out a stimulating study of the 1980s
historical turning point to analyse its origins and legacy, particularly in
Europe, while reconsidering what was described at the time, on both
sides of the Atlantic, as the “conservative revolution.” It is also useful
to endeavour to shed light on the present day’s woes, and therefore
contribute to national and European debates which question both the
social liberalism paradigm and the trend towards nationalism and protec-
tionism. Taking all this into account, the paradox of laisser-faire imposed
by the State, and, more fundamentally, of the exact place and role of the
State in Thatcher–Reagan neoliberalism should be set in perspective.
Yet, writing a new book on neoliberalism in 2022 may seem a daunting
task. There is already a proliferation of studies on the subject, neoliber-
alism having become a topical issue that has fostered as much research as
other ideologies ending in “ism.” In the 2000s, e.g., an average of 117
books per year were published on neoliberalism worldwide (Brennetot,
2014) and, between 2002 and 2005, the term was used in about 1000
academic articles annually (Boas & Gans- Morse, 2009: 138). In 2014,
Davies (2014: 311) wrote a biographical review of neoliberalism focusing
on texts from a wide range of social sciences “to look at the ideas,
rationalities and policies through which neoliberalism is constructed and
sustained.” Three major comprehensive handbooks have since explored
the concept to present the “state of the art” in research (Cahill et al.,
2018; Eagleton-Pierce, 2016; Springer et al., 2016). As a field of study,
neoliberalism has indeed expanded exponentially since 2000, “coinciding
with the meteoric rise of this phenomenon as a hegemonic ideology, a
state form, a policy and programme, an epistemology, and a version of
governmentality” (Springer et al., 2016: 1).

Defining “Neoliberalism”
Researchers are divided regarding the usefulness of a “slippery” term
(Mudge, 2008), often deemed “too elusive” or “ill-defined.” For
example, neoliberalism is “a deeply entrenched and normalised policy
paradigm-cum-ideological common-sense, though quite perplexingly
30 N. A. CHAMPROUX ET AL.

elusive” (Cahill et al., 2018: xxii) sometimes used as “a catch-all short-


hand for the horrors associated with globalisation and recurring financial
crises.” (Stedman Jones, 2012: 2) Neoliberalism as “an analytic category”
thus generates controversy (Clarke, 2008). As regards the wide range of
fields where neoliberalism can be located, it is usually used derogatorily
and indiscriminately to pinpoint anything detrimental in social processes,
institutions, and social actors (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009). Neoliberalism
has also been challenged as “an object of critique” from a left-wing and
Marxist perspective (O’Connor, 2010; Phelan, 2021). As Harvey (2005:
3, 64) puts it, “it has evolved in such a way as to depart significantly
from the template theory provides. The somewhat chaotic evolution and
uneven geographical development of state institutions, powers, and func-
tions over the last thirty years suggests, furthermore, that the neoliberal
state may be an unstable and contradictory political form” generating
much “creative destruction.” The radical left, anti-globalisation move-
ments from the 1990s onwards, and then various “sovereignists,” depict
neoliberalism as “an absolutist, unequal and anti-democratic ideology,
serving the interests of the dominant classes, which has managed to
become established among the majority of political elites in the current
world” (Brennetot, 2014).
Neoliberalism should not be addressed as “a monolith” to jettison
charges from critical scholars, but as a plurality of manifestations, admit-
tedly originating from an Anglo-American mould. Despite its disputed
epistemological foundation, it should be considered “a rather broad and
general concept referring to an economic model or paradigm that rose
to prominence in the 1980s. Built upon the classical liberal ideas of the
self-regulating market, Neoliberalism comes in several strands and varia-
tions. The best way to conceptualize it is to think of it as four intertwined
manifestations (an ideology, a mode of governance, a policy package, and
a particular form of capitalism)” (Steger & Roy, 2021: 12). Some have
studied it as “many types of neoliberal phenomena” (Boas & Gans-Morse,
2009: 143–145), or “in the plural Neoliberalisms,” (Steger & Roy, 2021:
xviii) highlighting “the diversity and heterogeneity of the neoliberal style”
and “the varieties of neoliberal epistemology beyond market worship”
(Plehwe et al., 2020: 5, 16). The same authors (Plehwe et al., 2020:
3) argue that “avoiding the term does little to address the ideology it
was coined to describe.” Therefore, neoliberalism should be approached
as a multifaceted phenomenon (an intellectual movement, an intellec-
tual network, a political project, and a useful descriptor of real-world
3 INTRODUCTION 31

phenomena) which has caused a radical restructuring and reorganisation


of the economy, politics, society, culture, and the environment (Cahill
et al., 2018; Plehwe et al., 2020).
Several conceptual approaches have structured research on neoliber-
alism depending on the broader methodological commitments (Cahill &
Konings, 2017: 6–16; Cahill et al., 2018: xxvii). Brich (2015) has iden-
tified no fewer than 7 distinct approaches to study neoliberalism: (1) a
“Foucauldian approach,” (2) a “Marxist approach,” (3) an “ideational
approach,” (4) a “history and philosophy of economics” approach, (5) An
“institutional approach,” (6) a “regulation theory” approach, and (7) a
“geographical” approach. While Venugopal (2015: 183) has analysed “the
uncoordinated and weakly grounded conceptual proliferation of Neolib-
eralism and its one-sided usage by critics and non-economists,” others
have pointed to “little direct engagement between the different under-
standings of Neoliberalism.” (Cahill et al., 2018: xxvii) In their SAGE
handbook on neoliberalism, the same authors decided “not to present a
particular interpretation of neoliberalism, but rather to reflect the breadth
of contemporary scholarship on this contested concept through the inclu-
sion of a diversity of perspectives on the phenomenon from across the
social sciences” (Cahill et al., 2018: xxvii).
In this volume, we decided to follow suit and “to allow readers to
reflect upon the variegated approaches to understanding neoliberalism”
(Cahill et al., 2018: xxvii). The analysis of neoliberalism is thus based on
a multidisciplinary approach involving prominent specialists in the fields
of intellectual history, politics, economics, and the law, but each contrib-
utor has accounted for and made sense of neoliberalism in his or her
own way, using either an “ideational approach,” a “history and philos-
ophy of economics” approach, or an “institutional approach.” What has
mattered most was to explore the idea of dissemination over a prolonged
period to assess the development, expansion, impact, and spreading of
the Anglo-American neoliberal paradigm that germinated in the 1980s
not only on/in the UK and the US, but also on/in Europe.

Dissemination of the Concept


Outside the Anglosphere, neoliberalism developed as “a remarkably versa-
tile and adaptable creature,” (Steger & Roy, 2021: xvii) compelling the
global South to comply with tough new rules designed to generate
economic development. These policies were exported outside the UK
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Women wore sandals or low shoes. Black was the usual color for
foot-coverings, but gay colors were worn by women and young men.
The warm climate and custom permitted people often to dispense
with shoes in the house, and working-men went barefoot.

FIG. 69. GREEK SANDAL


FIG. 70. GREEK JEWELRY

The hair was worn long by men until the fifth century, and the
Spartans and Athenian gentlemen who admired Spartan ways
continued the fashion. It was sometimes allowed to fall on the
shoulders in curls or braids, but was more frequently braided in two
plaits and wound around the head, or made into a sort of roll at the
back and fastened by a gold pin. In the sixth century men wore
pointed beards without moustaches, but later it became customary to
shave the entire face, though short beards and moustaches were
worn by older men. A warrior arming, on an amphora on the bottom
of Case 4, has a pointed beard and long hair. His young squire, who
stands behind him, is beardless but his hair is long and curling. The
lyre-player on a large amphora on Pedestal R3 in the Third Room
has long hair in a knot at the back, held in place by a band. A
somewhat similar arrangement is seen in the bronze statuette of
Apollo in Case C2 in the same room. The fashion of plaited hair
wound around the head is illustrated by a terracotta relief of Phrixos
on the ram’s back in Case E in the Fourth Room. In the fifth century
short hair was usual for both young and old men; young men did not
wear beards but older men frequently wore short beards with
moustaches. A moustache without a beard was regarded as the
mark of the barbarian. The marble heads of two young men, Nos. 12
and 14 in the Sculpture Gallery, and the athlete’s head on Pedestal
H in the Sixth Room show the fashion for young men, and a
comparison of the vases and small bronzes in the Third Room with
those in the Fourth Room will make clear the gradual change of style
from elaboration to simplicity.
FIG. 71. WOMEN’S COIFFURES

The styles of women’s hair-dressing can be best understood by


looking at the statues, vases, and terracottas in the collection. A
variety of ornamental kerchiefs was worn, especially a very pretty
band called sphendone, “sling,” from its shape (fig. 71). On the
bottom of Case J in the Fifth Room is a large stamnos decorated
with groups of women dressed in the Ionic and Doric chitons and
wearing various kinds of head-dresses. Many of the terracottas in
the Sixth Room and the head of a young goddess, No. 7 in the
Sculpture Gallery, illustrate the “melon” coiffure which became the
mode in the fourth century.
Fashions in dress were the same in general throughout the Greek
world, although of course there were local peculiarities. In Sparta
boys and men often wore only a small wrap without a chiton, and
young men commonly went barefoot. The women wore the Doric
chiton.

FIG. 72. STRIGIL

The jewelry in use included necklaces and bracelets, rings for the
ears and fingers, and pins for the hair and clothes. The Doric chiton
originally required two very large pins, which were inserted with the
points upwards, but they went out of use in the sixth century when
the Ionic chiton came into fashion and were not worn with the later
Doric chiton. The fibula or safety-pin was used throughout the Greek
and Roman world. A group of these pins of various types is exhibited
in Case D in the Second Room. The fibula illustrated in the head-
band is in the Gold Room. Greek jewelry of the fifth and fourth
centuries was frequently of great beauty. Precious stones were used
but seldom until the Hellenistic period, but the excellence of Greek
workmanship has rarely been equalled by other craftsmen. The
Greek gentleman permitted himself only a handsome ring which was
useful as a seal, and the artistic value of these engraved seal rings
of gold or of gold set with a semi-precious stone has made them
favorites with collectors for many centuries. The rings and gems in
cases in the rooms of the Classical Wing, and the beautiful jewelry in
the Gold Room are proofs of the skill of Greek workmen and the fine
taste of their patrons (fig. 70).

FIG. 73. RAZOR

FIG. 74. ALABASTRON

Roman dress was similar to that of Greece in its principal


characteristics. The clothing of women was the same as that of the
Greek lady of the Hellenistic age represented in the terracotta
statuettes. The Ionic chiton, made usually of wool instead of linen,
and called stola, was worn in the house, but the married woman’s
stola had a wide piece like a flounce sewn on at the bottom. For the
street the himation, called by the Romans palla, was worn over it.
The Roman citizen wore a white woolen tunic like the Greek chiton,
but it was usually provided with short sleeves. Senators, knights, and
free-born children had this tunic ornamented with purple stripes
running from each shoulder to the bottom, both front and back. In the
statue of a camillus in the Eighth Room the stripes were inlaid in
silver, of which traces remain. Over this was worn the toga,
corresponding to the Greek himation and arranged in the same
general way. The toga, however, was usually larger than the
himation and was semicircular on the lower edge. For senators,
knights, and children it was ornamented with a broad purple stripe
following the straight edge. Shoes and sandals of various kinds were
in use; a special kind of high shoe called calceus was always worn
with the toga, and the tunic, toga, and calceus formed the regulation
dress for citizens in public. The toga, being a very heavy,
cumbersome garment, was not worn for traveling or active work, and
for these purposes there were many small wraps and longer cloaks
of various shapes.
FIG. 75. ARYBALLOS

FIG. 76. GLASS BOTTLE


Short hair was universally worn by men in Rome. Under the
Republic women’s hair was simply arranged, but throughout the
Imperial period a variety of styles prevailed at different times, most of
which were conspicuous for their bad taste and so elaborate that the
desired effect was produced by wearing wigs and wire supports.
Some of the better styles may be seen on the portraits in the
Sculpture Gallery, and on the heads of a girl and a woman on
pedestals in the Eighth Room. During most of their history the
Romans did not wear beards or moustaches, but under the Empire
fashion fluctuated, following the style favored by the reigning
emperor. After the time of Trajan beards were usual.

FIG. 77. SILVER PYXIS


FIG. 78. TERRACOTTA PYXIS

Roman ladies were fond of ornaments and wore a great many of


them. Large sums of money were expended on precious stones and
on shoes and other garments embroidered with pearls. During the
Republican period the Roman wore a gold ring as the badge of his
citizenship, but in the Imperial period, with the increase of luxurious
bad taste, dandies sometimes covered all the joints of their fingers
with rings.
Requisites for the toilet do not differ greatly from one period to
another, since the purposes for which they were intended remain
practically the same; so we find much that seems familiar among
those of the Greeks and Romans. Probably the oldest article in this
group is a razor with a crescent-shaped blade, made in Italy in the
early Iron Age. The shape seems to have been a common one (fig.
73). Tweezers, of which an example is shown in Case 5, were used
for removing superfluous hair. An article of daily use in ancient times,
though we have no modern utensil to correspond with it, is the strigil
or flesh-scraper (Case 5, fig. 72). It was used especially by athletes
after exercise, to remove the dust and sand of the wrestling-ground,
so that the strigil, oil-flask, and sponge became in Greece a kind of
symbol for the athlete’s life, which was, practically speaking, the life
of all well-to-do young men. On a gravestone, No. 7 in the Sculpture
Gallery, the dead youth is represented with a strigil in his hand, while
his little slave holds his towel and oil-flask. Both men and women
used strigils in the bath for scraping off the fuller’s earth or lye
powder used as soap. A silver strigil was included in the tomb
furniture of an Etruscan lady which is exhibited in Case F in the Sixth
Room. There is an example in glass of Roman date in Case 5.

FIG. 79. SPATULA

FIG. 80. DIPPING-ROD

It was customary among the Greeks and Romans to rub the body
with oil after the bath. The small jar called aryballos (Case G in the
Fifth Room, fig. 75) and the taller alabastron (Case 2, and Case A in
the Fourth Room, fig. 74) were used for holding oil and perfumes for
toilet use. Some small glass toilet bottles in Case J in the Third
Room are so charming in shape and coloring as to make a modern
woman envious (fig. 76). In the Gold Room are two crystal scent
bottles from Cyprus, one of which has a gold stopper. The toilet box
or pyxis held ointment, rouge, face or tooth powders, or small toilet
articles or ornaments. These charming boxes were made of metal,
as the silver box in Case F in the Sixth Room (fig. 77), or of painted
terracotta. The latter are often triumphs of the potter’s and vase
painter’s art; for example, the white pyxis in Case V in the Fourth
Room (fig. 78) and the red-figured pyxis in Case A in the same room,
with its interesting drawings of women working wool (compare fig.
39). Others of a variety of shapes and decoration will be found in
Cases C and G in the Fifth Room.

FIG. 81. GREEK MIRROR ON A STAND


FIG. 82. ETRUSCAN MIRROR

FIG. 83. GREEK MIRROR AND COVER

The bronze boxes known as cistae are Etruscan. Some of those


which have been found in tombs are very large and are elegantly
decorated with engraved scenes. They seem to have been a kind of
dressing-case, for holding all of a lady’s toilet equipment. A small
one was included in the tomb furniture of an Etruscan woman which
is shown in Case F in the Sixth Room.
Bronze spatulae were useful in a variety of ways for mixing and
applying the cosmetics which were employed so constantly by Greek
and Roman ladies (fig. 79). An instrument corresponding to our
medicine droppers are the dipping-rods of bronze or glass. They
could be inserted into bottles or jars to take out a small quantity of
liquid. A disk about half way up the rod kept it from slipping into the
bottle (fig. 80). Examples of both utensils will be found in Case 5.
Ancient mirrors were as inferior to the modern in power to reflect
as they are superior in beauty. Disks of highly polished metal, usually
bronze, were employed for this purpose, for the process of making a
mirror by backing a sheet of glass is not older than the fourteenth
century. Sometimes the mirror consists of a simple disk, plain or
ornamented on one side with an engraving or a design in relief, or
again it is made in one piece with a long handle or with a short tang
to be inserted into a bone or ivory handle, or it is provided with a
ring. The disk is often protected with a cover which bears the
principal decoration. Etruscan mirrors most frequently have handles
but no covers, and are decorated with engraved scenes, usually
taken from Greek mythology (fig. 82). Greek mirrors are of two types:
either a simple disk without a handle, fitting into a cover, usually
ornamented with a relief (fig. 83), or a disk supported on a stand,
often in the form of a human figure (fig. 81). In Case A in the Fourth
Room are two fine examples of the latter, two stands from which the
mirrors have been lost, and a mirror with a cover decorated with a
woman’s head in relief. Another charming stand of Etruscan
workmanship is in Case H in the Third Room. In Case A in the Fifth
Room are four very beautiful Greek mirrors of the fourth century, and
in Case C in the Sixth Room are examples of both Greek and
Etruscan types. A pretty terracotta statuette of a lady using a mirror
is in Case G in the same room; she is arranging her hair while
balancing her mirror on her knee.
VII
AMUSEMENTS, MUSIC, AND
DANCING
CASES 1, 3, AND 5

As at the present time, festivities frequently centered around


dining. In Greece, many dinners were given by men to their friends,
followed by the symposium, at which the guests drank wine mixed
with water, told jests, sang, and often watched hired performers,
such as jugglers, tumblers, and dancers. A kylix in Case E in the
Fourth Room is decorated with a scene from a symposium (fig. 84).
The special game for this occasion was “kottabos,” which was
played with the aid of a bronze contrivance like a candelabrum, of
which an example stands in the Fifth Room (fig. 85). The players
held their cups by one handle and tried to throw a small quantity of
liquid on the bronze disk at the top of the shaft, so that it fell down
with a ringing sound. The game was also played by throwing the
liquid into nutshells or small saucers floating in a krater full of water,
so as to make them sink. Many games of chance were known to the
Greeks and Romans. Perhaps the most popular were those played
with the knucklebones (astragaloi) of sheep and goats. They could
be used like dice, and also like “jacks,” being thrown up and caught
on the back of the hand. A toilet box on the middle shelf of Case 3
(fig. 87) shows three women playing, one of whom has an astragal
on the back of her hand. The knob on the cover of the box is
appropriately made in the same form. Nine very small examples of
glass are in Case 1 (fig. 86). The invention of draughts was ascribed
to Palamedes, one of the heroes of the Trojan War, a story which at
least proves that they were played in Greece in very early times.
Nuts and coins were also used as counters in various games, and
games of dice were played in various ways. Astragals could be used
as dice, and had the advantage of needing no marks, as the sides
were naturally different.

FIG. 84. SYMPOSIUM

The musical instruments in use were the lyre and kithara and the
flute, with some other less common varieties of stringed instruments.
The kithara, the instrument of professional musicians, had a
sounding-board and hollow arms of wood. The strings extended from
the “yoke,” a cross-piece connecting the arms, to the sounding-
board. The kithara was usually played standing, and was hung by a
band to the performer’s shoulders. He played with both hands, using
the plectron or “pick” in his right. A rather rude terracotta from
Cyprus in Case 1 represents a woman with a kithara, a terracotta
statuette of Eros with a kithara is in Case K in the Seventh Room,
and a wall-painting in the Eighth Room represents a lady playing one
(see fig. 21). Kithara players in festal costume at the public games
are represented on three vases in the collection (Case K in the Third
Room and Cases E and Y in the Fourth Room). Another illustration
is on an amphora on the bottom of Case P in the Fifth Room, where
Apollo, the god of music, stands before an altar holding his favorite
instrument (fig. 90). The best representation, however, is the kithara
held by a gold siren who forms the pendant of an earring exhibited in
the Gold Room. The details of construction are fully worked out and
the attachment of the strings can be clearly seen. Those used at
public festivals were often richly ornamented with carving and inlay
of semi-precious stones.
FIG. 85. KOTTABOS-
STAND
FIG. 86. GLASS ASTRAGALS

FIG. 87. GIRLS PLAYING WITH ASTRAGALS

The lyre was the usual instrument of the amateur. Boys learned to
play it at school, and gentlemen were expected to be able to
accompany themselves upon it at symposia. Its sounding-board was
made of the shell of a tortoise covered on one side with wood. The
upright pieces, curved outward and in again toward the top, were
sometimes made of the horns of animals. It had a yoke near the
ends of the uprights, and a bridge on the sounding-board. The
strings, of sheep’s guts or sinews, varied in number from three to
eleven at different periods, but seven was the usual number in the
fifth century. The plectron was generally used in playing both
instruments. Several good illustrations of the lyre may be seen in the
Museum collection. A satyr with a lyre decorates an amphora on the
shelf in Case J in the Fourth Room. On the bottom of Case O is an
amphora showing Kephalos with a lyre (fig. 88), and on the shelf
above a boy singing to the lyre will be seen in the interior of a kylix. A
man holding a lyre, probably a guest at a symposium, decorates the
inside of a kylix in Case E. An interesting little bronze figure in Case
C 2 in the Third Room represents a musician in festival dress with
the same instrument. The statuette was probably a votive offering for
success in a contest.

FIG. 88. YOUTH WITH A LYRE

FIG. 89. GIRL DANCING AND PLAYING THE


CASTANETS

You might also like