The term neoliberalism has become too vague to serve as a precise analytical framework.

Evidence

However, neoliberalism has also become a catchall for a number of related but discrete phenomena: political projects (particularly the tax-cutting and safety-net-slashing governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan), economic thinkers (Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School), capitalist ideologies (individualism, market fundamentalism, human capital), policy prescriptions (privatization, deregulation, austerity, globalization), negative outcomes (labor precarity, wealth inequality, environmental destruction), and other reconfigurations that have accelerated since the 1970s. As the term has expanded in meaning, neoliberalism has provided a necessary clarion call but has lost its precision as an analytical framework. At worst, use of the term neoliberalism, rather than capitalism or class struggle, risks depicting recent shifts as mere aberrations in need of political reform, a fantasy that this “bad capitalism” could be tamed, that the golden era of postwar prosperity can be reestablished if we just pursue the right policies. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: Catalogues the divergent referents collapsed into the catchall term neoliberalism and flags its lost analytical precision.
• XREF: connects to: Some scholars argue the term neoliberalism has become analytically useless. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 444; An ostensibly singular concept can lull analysts into overgeneralization. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 87