The term ‘neoliberalism’ was coined at the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann

Evidence

The term neoliberalism was apparently coined at the Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris in 1938 (Denord 2001; also Chapter 1 in this volume; Lemke, 2001, 204) to herald the appearance of a new orientation toward the previous liberal tradition. The term was also briefly entertained by Milton Friedman (1951) to indicate the ambitions of Chicago and Mont Pèlerin. Interesting here are the repeated evocations of neoliberalisms before the fact, since it is our impression that much of the content and practice of the new position was in fact progressively worked out over the period 1946–1980, but not exclusively at Chicago and MPS. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 775

The term “neoliberalism” was coined at the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann, a gathering of scholars who laid the political-intellectual foundations for what would take shape as the Mont Pelerin Society a decade later. Neoliberalism is most commonly associated with a bundle of policies privatizing public ownership and services, radically reducing the social state, leashing labor, deregulating capital, and producing a tax-and-tariff-friendly climate to direct foreign investors. These were precisely the policies imposed on Chile by Augusto Pinochet and his advisors, the “Chicago Boys,” in 1973 and soon after carried elsewhere in the Global South, often imposed by the International Monetary Fund as “structural adjustment” mandates tied to borrowing and debt restructuring. — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 36

Categorization

• CANDY: A clean, tweetable etymology tidbit: the word ‘neoliberalism’ was born at a specifically named Paris conference in 1938.
• DEFINE: Pinpoints the term’s coinage moment that the Mont Pelerin Society built on a decade later.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 775; Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 36
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberalism was born in part as an emergency response to the 1938 crisis atmosphere. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 182; The term neoliberalism was coined at the 1938 colloquium on a cartelist’s suggestion — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 267; The 1938 neoliberal agenda assigned the state a large welfare role — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 353 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The term neoliberalism first appeared in 1898 as a pejorative for neoclassical economics. #contradicts (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2092