Count me among those not sold on the idea of a neoliberal America, mainly because I’m not sold on the idea of neoliberalism in the first place. Ben’s fascinating trans-Atlantic genealogy of neoliberalism seems to suggest the problems with the term. It is too intellectually fuzzy and, especially when its European meaning (to borrow from Ben’s analysis) is attached to the United States, it seems too often to presume a bad history. Let me explain. When the European meaning of neoliberalism–roughly, according to Ben, the revival of laissez-faire economics through the Austrian and then Chicago schools of economics–is applied to Read more