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Comment by flownoon2 | Hacker News Reader

This article presents a half dozen very different definitions of “neoliberalism”

> The term "neoliberalism" has been understood in a variety of ways: as a package of policy prescriptions; a design philosophy for state-market relations; the spirit of leading institutions of global economic governance; a form of politics focused on private property ownership and consumption as civic participation; a form [End Page 559] of political and social subjectivity; and a distinct epoch in the history of modern capitalism beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But it also talks about how we are in “a world dominated by neoliberalism”.

Talking about omnipresent and powerful, yet nebulous and vague forces… to me it sounds more theological than economic

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You say that, but if you go to conferences or "think-tank" events (barf, I know) filled with politicians, economists, or policy experts, you'll see a remarkably uniform set of economic and policy positions presented. Is 'neoliberal' the best name for this? Probably not, but it nonetheless is the name that has stuck for a really quite hegemonic way of understanding how governments, the state, economies, and monetary systems, should interact with one another. In many ways, it's an attempt to create an unholy mixture of old-school Keynesian economics with Chicago style libertarianism advanced by Friedman and his proteges during and in the wake of the Cold War.

The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter is a recent biography on John Maynard Keynes that is also a fascinating look at the history and transformations of economic thought after Keynes. I highly recommend it.

I would expect any coherent group - any group that goes to the same conferences and events - to develop some common views. "Neoliberalism" makes sense only with some other view to contrast it with in mind.

But the difference here is that neoliberalism is really about class interest, and so the policy is vacillating and inconsistent with respect to the jargon that hides class interests of monopoly capitalists, or better, the diverse interests of multinational corporations or the "member economies" that house them.

I prefer Sison's definition, pretty much that neoliberalism is a set of BS jargon used to rationalize the greed of monopoly capitalists. Neoliberals are monopoly capitalists and their stooges that promote free trade by using free competition logic, when in reality we're in the age of imperialism. For example, neoliberals argue for comparative advantage, and maybe their was a basis for this in the world of Ricardo, but today it amounts to the crippling of developing economies: export-optimized industry for low value additions in the global value chain of large corporations. Take the banana wars for example.

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