From Authoritarian Liberalism to Economic Technocracy: Neoliberalism, Politics and ‘De-democratization’

Neoliberalism is often sharply contrasted with collectivist ideologies, including conservatism and fascism as well as socialism. This paper challenges such a characterization as too one-sided, focusing on neoliberalism in the context of ‘crises’ of liberal modernity, highlighting significant areas of overlap with authoritarian conservative and neo-fascist critiques of the rise of ‘mass democracy’ in the 1930s, and the common project to resist the politicization of the market economy and constitutional order. This project was applied and adapted in the post-1945 context, and specifically the second crisis of liberal modernity in the 1960s and 1970s, which turned to insights from the Chicago School to support economic technocracy over democracy. It was in this context that neoliberals developed either a more explicit authoritarianism in order to resist the demands of democracy, or the reconstruction of governance according to market principles, both designed to ‘de-democratize’ the liberal democratic political order.