Conclusion

To a large extent, this has been an exercise in political swear words. Fascism is today almost universally seen as one, even by most political parties historically inspired by the phenomenon or belonging to the same tradition. ¹ With the exception of a few generally marginal extremist groups and equally marginal intellectuals, nobody calls him/herself a fascist. ² More or less the same is true for neoliberalism. Although considered a less absolute evil than fascism, little positive meaning is intended when the spectre of neoliberalism is conjured up in a present-day political context. This is partially the result of how the neoliberal milieu itself developed during the second half of the twentieth century. While the term was used as a positive epithet by neoliberals during the two decades following its invention in 1938, this began to change during the late 1950s alongside the rising dominance inside the Mont Pèlerin Society of a Chicago-School radical anti-statism that looked remarkably like classical liberalism. During the same period, the MPS lost the support of its founding members Raymond Aron, Polanyi and Jouvenel, who grew bored with its laissez-faire dogmatism and highly technical discussions and therefore stopped attending its meetings. In 1960, in a letter to Milton Friedman, Jouvenel admitted feeling ‘out of harmony with the Society’, which he saw turning ever more strongly to ‘a Manicheism according to which the State can do no good and private enterprise can do no wrong’. ³