Neoliberalism’s political character was ambiguous from the start, with left and right currents blurring

Evidence

The incipient emergence of neoliberalism was not altogether free from ambiguity, however, since the term also began to pop up on the left. Frank Knight (1934) in Chicago rejected the mixing of ideologies he perceived in the new social liberalism, though research is needed to better understand the crisscrossing relationships between the left-leaning social liberalism and the right-leaning neoliberalism. How can it be explained that at the London School of Economics and Political Science, founded by Fabian Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the economics department developed a decidedly neoliberal orientation under the guidance of Edwin Cannan (Apel 1961, 9)? Cannan gathered together a group of young disciples who devoted themselves to a determined rethinking of market solutions to the challenges of the day in opposition to answers given by Keynes(ians) at Cambridge and elsewhere. Foucault (2004, 130f.) focused on Karl Schiller to describe the process of Social Democratic approximation to a neoliberal understanding of economic policy making in Germany21 before entering the federal government at the end of the 1960s. Both during the 1930s and the first decades after World War II, a certain amount of confusion persisted with regard to proper understanding of the political character of neoliberalism. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader literature on the Mont Pèlerin network’s ideological heterogeneity and to Foucault’s lectures on German ordoliberalism. — connects to: Neoliberal structural change ironically fueled statist planning and right-wing populism despite anti-statist rhetoric. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 303; Disputes over the word neoliberalism signaled real disagreement over its content — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 294; Neoliberal think tanks deliberately concealed their political aims from the public in the 1950s. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2175
• QUESTION: Why did the LSE economics department, founded by Fabians, turn so decidedly neoliberal under Cannan? Worth chasing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 103

Broader Connections

• Disputes over the word neoliberalism signaled real disagreement over its content #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 294