Business conservatives funding the postwar right were not cleanly neoliberal

Evidence

For a discussion of the role of money and wealth in building the postwar right, see David Chappell, “The Triumph of Conservatives in a Liberal Age,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosensweig (eds.), Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 312. The question of whether the business conservatives were “neoliberal” is complicated. They were generally most interested in reversing the New Deal, especially with regard to labor unions, so in the sense of wanting to move society back to an earlier point, they were certainly conservatives. In addition, their sense that they understood a set of underlying social laws and principles about the way that society should operate, and that activists in social movements were ignorant of these, gave them a certain skepticism about labor unions and policies encouraging economic redistribution, and in this respect as well they were akin to conservatives of old. At the same time, they were enthusiastic about capitalism and the market, in contrast to thinkers such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver. In addition, they were rarely completely consistent—they were not opposed to various uses of the state to further the interests of business. And Jasper Crane—of special significance for this chapter—wrote that he wished that he could still call himself a “liberal.” For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will refer to them as conservatives, both because of the intellectual logic of doing so and because historically they affiliated themselves with a political movement that had little ambivalence about adopting the word. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1478

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to ongoing definitional debate over what ‘neoliberal’ properly means and who counts — connects to broader neoliberal historiography (Mirowski, Van Horn, Stedman Jones). — connects to: The Depression forced postwar conservatives to rebuild capitalism’s foundations, not defend them — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 33; Free-market liberalism and traditionalist conservatism were irreconcilable uneasy allies — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 375; French employer organizations held radically divergent versions of postwar liberalism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 290 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle: the funding class’s self-identification as ‘liberals’ versus the historians’ label of ‘conservative’ — how donor identity politics shaped which thinkers got funded and named.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism lacks a stable meaning or historically specific constituency #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 17