What one word means: neoliberalism

Google n-grams of neoliberalism, neo-liberalism

It’s so long since I read about economics that I quite missed the growth of the term “neoliberalism”; perhaps I was even more asleep than I thought. Actually, the term was only just becoming more widely used in the early 1990s. But when a term becomes so widespread it is given its own volume in the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, it has clearly become mainstream.The blurb for that volumes states confidently "In its heyday in the late 1990s, neoliberalism emerged as the world's dominant economic paradigm". But what does it actually mean? And who uses it? It looked about time for me to try to work out who is using the word and why.

If you are a lexicographer, you would start defining a word by looking at a corpus, a collection of documents and/or utterances. Hoping that your corpus is as large and hence as representative as possible, you will then look at all the examples of the word you are studying, and identify a number of meanings from that corpus. Given enough examples of the word usage, it should be possible to estimate the proportion of each meaning. Equally cleverly, you can track the use of the term over time. Out of curiosity, I looked in Google n-grams for uses of the term “neoliberalism” and its variants. Clearly this is a term that has become increasingly popular since around 1990.

This lexicographic methodology is what two PhD students did for the term “neoliberalism” (and variants such as the hyphenated and/or capitalised forms). In a 2009 article, “Neoliberalism: from New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan”, they looked at 148 social science articles published 1998-2004 and came up with some remarkable conclusions. First, they used their subject knowledge to identify that this one term was being used in different senses across those articles. They identified four main meanings, with the proportion of occurrences of each meaning in parentheses:

• A policy (72%) of reducing the role of the state in the economy
• A development model (39%) a set of economic theories
• An ideology (22%), a belief in how individuals and groups should behave
• A paradigm (14%), a set of assumptions about how an economy functions.

Of course, these meanings are not mutually exclusive, so the percentages do not sum to 100. Nonetheless, there is a striking variation in meaning. Secondly, they found in these articles that the term “neoliberalism” is used with both positive and negative connotations.

Thirdly, and most remarkably, they found that 69% of the articles they considered provided no definition of the term. Here is a challenge for anyone trying to understand natural language! It seems that in academic discourse, a very limited and formal register of English, following very strict rules about citing your sources and using no sarcasm or word play, variations in the meaning of key terms is widespread.

As a student of language, what conclusion would you draw from such a discovery? How can anyone ever learn a language when there is so much variation in meaning of key terms? Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that “neoliberalism” is a rather challenging word.  It seems to cover everything from Thatcherism and Reaganism to a general belief in “free” markets (and I found other articles that took the meanings a lot further). The number of books and articles that confidently use the term without defining it clearly expect the reader to identify whether they are using it positively or negatively from the context; or from the subject domain of the author or the journal in which the article was published.

The authors of the paper discovered more things about this term. It was almost never used self-referentially: nobody declares themselves to be a “neoliberal”. Secondly, and fascinatingly, they found that “neoliberalism” is used far more widely by political studies researchers than by economists. You could say this reveals one of the fascinating and maddening things about economists: many, perhaps most of the commentators about economics come from outside the field, yet still feel qualified to make judgements.

So next time you come across the term “neoliberalism”, ask yourself in what context the term is being used. Is the term defined, or do we have to infer what the connotations are for this context? Here is an example, taken at random, Ferdinand Mount in the TLS, September 6 2019: “Sassoon has little patience with those “neoliberals” who undervalue the role of the state in buttressing capitalism with the rule of law”. Clearly, Sassoon, the author of the book being reviewed, it using it to describe some thinkers negatively. But how do we infer which of the various meanings is in use in any one context? Natural language is quite a challenge - if you don't define your terms.

Postscript, 31 December 2019: As if to demonstrate the above points, the latest issue of the London Review of Books (dated 2 January 2020) has an extended discussion by Susan Pedersen of the term neoliberalism. It isn't defined; it is referred to, as if we all know what is meant by it, as a kind of shorthand for "our financialised, deregulated world". She describes "how the most common and human desires - for decent homes, better schools for our children, better healthcare for our parents, richer and happier lives - were used to help bring a solidaristic social order down under the rubric of "choice". So there is a kind of rather vague definition: the realignment of the state to provide choice instead of the existing social order. We know what she means - don't we?