Neoliberals coined the term themselves but abandoned it to claim continuity with classical liberalism.

Evidence

Contrary to the claims of our Wiki-workers, when the early MPS members cast about for a label to attach to the as-yet amorphous doctrine they had set out to construct, more often than not they did resort to the term neoliberalism in the early years of its existence. In French, the term was being used by the circles around the participants in the Colloque Walter Lippmann in the 1930s. Milton Friedman even used the term in the title of an early survey of the efforts of his comrades (1951). What has led so many subsequent commentators astray is the fact that most MPS members stopped using the term some time in the later 1950s. Indeed, at that juncture they ceased insisting that a rupture with the doctrines of classical liberalism was called for. This decision to support a public stance that the liberalism they championed was an effectively continuous political doctrine from the eighteenth century all the way through to their own revisionist meditations (such as endless paeans that it was all in Adam Smith) and therefore required no special neologism, turned out to be one of a number of precarious balancing acts performed in the course of constructing neoliberalism at the MPS. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2110

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the contested provenance of the term ‘neoliberalism’ — early MPS members used it self-referentially before dropping it in the late 1950s.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the strategic act of abandoning a self-coined label to claim intellectual continuity — how naming functions as a political instrument in doctrine-building.
• XREF: Connects to the broader historiography of how ‘neoliberalism’ got weaponized as an external label versus its self-designation history. — connects to: Neoliberals rejected classical liberalism’s rationalism in favor of critical conventionalism. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 90; The term ‘neoliberal’ was adopted deliberately to distance liberalism from pure laissez-faire — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 279; Neoliberalism was initially a self-declared identity, not an external label — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 364 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism was initially a self-declared identity, not an external label #corroborates (0.95) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 364
• Early neoliberals explicitly distanced themselves from classical laissez-faire doctrine #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 117
• Neoliberal institutions aimed to build a new creed, not revive old liberalism #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 773