AT THE eND OF hISTORY:

Neoliberalism is a slippery concept with a contested history. Its intellectual origins date back to the aftermath of the First World War, when the break-up of central European empires and the emergence of democratic nation states put private property at the mercy of elected governments.

Faced with this political transformation, conservative neoliberals set out to insulate the market economy from democratic forces. In the mid-20th century, while John Maynard Keynes sketched out the postwar order and led the British delegation at the 1944 Breton Woods conference, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek attacked technocratic planning and state intervention in The Road to Serfdom, which was published the same year.

But it wasn't until the 1980s that neoliberalism became the ascendant doctrine of modern politics, when world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile instigated a now-familiar programme of economic deregulation, financial privatisation and union-busting.

A major weakness of the term "neoliberalism" is its ubiquity - especially on the left, it has become a rhetorical insult so hackneyed it fails to capture anything in particular. The term "can mean whatever you want it to mean", Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News, wrote in 2018. The Observer's Will Hutton called it "a catch-all to indicate contempt for any policy or figure... the left considers to be departing from true 'socialism'".

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