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So are the denigrations of neoliberalism any different from the old, standard critiques of plain liberalism? Atomized individualism, vulgar commerce, no theory of the good, and the like? Is it all just warmed over?
I've been thinking lately about how neoliberalism is a revisionist exercise, an attempt to find a "third way" between laissez-faire and socialism as a response to critiques of liberalism. Didn't plan on a thread, but 2/
This works whether you think about the Very Online neoliberals who tried to adopt what was good in the Washington Consensus but add welfare states, or if you think of the original neoliberals who wanted to fix classical liberalism, as here: https://exponentsmag.org/2020/05/18/how-modern-neoliberals-rediscovered-neoliberalism/ 3/
Liberals are always responding to critiques and adjusting liberalism in ways that maintain or even further its essential values (individual as locus of value, pluralism, etc). https://www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-article-paul-crider/ 4/
But reading Helena Rosenblatt's Lost History of Liberalism and its discussions of especially the early French liberals--but if you're a Smith stan, add to taste--makes me think that early liberalism was far more robust to standard critiques of liberalism than some later forms. 5/
Many early liberals were very concerned with cultivating the Good, for example, and were animated by the plight of the disadvantaged. This isn't to deny that many later forms of liberalism really were caricatures of themselves, and have deserved all the criticism they got. 6/
But the revisionist impulse could just as easily be a "revivalist" impulse, attempting to bring back the meatier liberalisms of, e.g., Smith and Constant. And indeed "thick" liberals like Sen and Nussbaum etc have been doing this for a while. 7/7
