Liberalism in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Colloque Walter Lippmann

Abstract

The term "neoliberalism" is on everyone's lips. It is often used to criticize marketoriented reforms, the dismantling of the welfare state, skepticism toward democracy, and a roll-back of the state in general. This practice started in the 1970s and is now dominant. With its strong negative connotations in everyday use, the term serves above all a rhetorical function in political debates that cannot easily be reconciled with its earlier meanings. As former German President Joachim Gauck pointed out in a much-noticed speech, the term "neoliberal economic policy" was originally supposed to designate exactly the opposite: A reformed liberalism, very distinct from the laissez-faire of the 19 th century, emphasizing the essential constructive role of the state in shaping and enforcing the economic order (Gauck 2015).In fact, both a "substantive" and a "procedural" definition can be distilled from the history of liberalism. While the "procedural" view underscores that the history of neoliberalism can be understood as a sequence of renewals where, for example, Adam Smith is a neoliberal vis-à-vis John Locke, and John Stuart Mill is a neoliberal vis-àvis Smith and Locke (Kolev 2018, 66 -68), an example for the "substantive" demarcation attempt of a new liberalism can be found in the 1930s. One relatively welldocumented occasion was the Colloque Walter Lippmann (CWL) in Paris. The colloquium was held in August 1938 and brought together some of the most renowned

When Liberty Presupposes Order: F. A. Hayek’s Contextual Ordoliberalism

“…Interpersonally, this understanding of neoliberalism is broad, and is so very much on purpose: “neoliberalism” was not coined in the 1930s but more than hundred years earlier (Kolev 2018, pp. 66–68; Horn et al 2019; Magness 2021), and the positions were not homogenous. What united these various suppliers of neoliberalisms was the shared urgency to save liberal civilization, in the specific meaning each thinker attributed to the term “liberal civilization” (Dekker 2022; forthcoming).…”