American neoliberalism, as it matured in the 1970s, must be understood as an attempt to revive and reinvent the poor law tradition as a wholesale alternative to the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. This was not a project that was self-evident in the Chicago School of American neoliberalism at its starting point in the 1930s, and indeed it was far from evident as late as 1970, when Milton Friedman could be found collaborating with President Nixon on the project of a basic guaranteed income. Rather, it crystallized in the mid-1970s—a turning point in American politics, when the perfect storm of inflation, unemployment, and the rising militancy of the new left convinced neoliberals they must articulate a much more potent critique of the expansion of welfare under President Johnson’s Great Society.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 215