NOTHING SO BECOMES A NEOLIBERAL AS DENYING HE IS ONE:

At a time when many movements that are thought to be the intellectual mainstream, left and right, advocate further encroachments on free and open economic exchange, those who cherish voluntary human interaction are likely to expend their energies navigating a political wilderness. 

It is therefore natural for us to seek out common ground with professed advocates of a free and open market system, wherever they may manifest. Though we might call this underlying philosophical precept "market liberalism," certain strains of its current iteration diverge from that which is designated liberalism in the classical sense. There is danger in the confused condition that sees market liberalism as but an instrument by which to bring about scientific supervision of socioeconomic life wherein human behavior might be molded and subsequently fine-tuned to "correct" for unwanted products of voluntary exchange that attract the scrutinizing subjectivity of the technocrat.

With this concern in mind, I turn my attention to the nebulous concept of "neoliberalism" - a label that has, more than once, been involuntarily assigned to my own work, despite an explicit repudiation of it in the same. The peculiar term functions as both a fashionable bête noire of academic progressivism, and, to a much smaller extent, an articulated philosophy onto itself among a mostly center-right faction of market-oriented think tankers and policy professionals. 

Although it has become an ubiquitous feature of political theorizing in recent decades, neoliberalism's precise definition remains elusive.

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