Disputes over the word neoliberalism signaled real disagreement over its content

Evidence

The French neoliberals discovered they could not even unanimously endorse the term neoliberalism. Whereas Jacques Rueff, who opposed the term in the 1930s, finally ended up accepting it, others refused, finding that the term was either “worn down, compromised … by the unhappy destiny of neo-socialism,” or that it was synonymous with an interventionism that compromised the existence of a competitive order. … This disagreement over terms was not just a quarrel over words. When defined as a doctrine aiming to preserve the framework within which a market economy is sustainable, neoliberalism could potentially inspire a form of planning. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 294

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘neoliberalism’ as a label was contested in its own founding milieu, tied to whether state-framing interventions counted as legitimate.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘neoliberalism could potentially inspire a form of planning’ suggests a reading of early neoliberalism as planning-adjacent worth investigating given later narratives.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 294
• XREF: connects to: Failing to settle on a shared label fractured the nascent neoliberal movement. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 186; The paleoliberal and neoliberal labels once marked opposing camps within the liberal revival — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 350; Both the Mont Pèlerin Society and its leftist critics obscured what neoliberalism is — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 77 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism lacks a stable meaning or historically specific constituency #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 17
• Neoliberalism holds together several unresolved internal contradictions by asserting both sides at once #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2142
• Neoconservatism and neoliberalism remain contested as distinct or overlapping schools #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1822