This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 17th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What is neoliberalism?

Where did it come from?

Where does it differ from libertarianism?

Why is it that so often when someone calls you a neoliberal, they're not trying to be polite?

And what is this?

A crossover episode?

Jeremiah Johnson is the policy director for the neoliberal project and this... So,

Jeremiah Johnson is the policy director for the Neoliberal Project, and this, right here, what you're listening to now, is, yes, a crossover episode of the Cato Daily Podcast and the Neoliberal Project podcast.

So the term neoliberal was first used in the 1930s and really grew organically out of a couple conferences that were essentially gatherings of academics and people concerned about the state of liberalism and politics.

The Walter Lippman colloqu was one of these conferences and one of the

follow-ups that many of the people at the Walter Lippman colloqu attended was the Mount Perilin Society.

So I'm forgetting off the top of my head who actually coined the term but in the late

1930s and 1940s, the term neoliberalism came about because this group of people was very concerned about the state of liberalism.

They were concerned about the fact that literal, you know, Nazi fascist totalitarianism was on the rise, kind of on the right-hand side of politics and on the left you saw the rise of

literal Stalinist communism so they lived in a world where liberalism looked like a

feeble sick old man and it looked like a failing ideology and they thought they needed a new version of liberalism a

rejuvenated liberalism and so they called it neoliberalism as an update to the classical liberal philosophy.

Yeah, it's easy for people to forget the times that Americans lived in in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and what looked like

potentially an ascendant state control of, you know, the commanding heights of the economy,

whether it be from the left to the right.

...