The term "neoliberalism" originated with economists affiliated with the German Freiburg school in the years after World War II. Theorists like Rüstow, Eucken, Röpke, and Müller-Armack sought to decouple from laissez-faire economic policy a classical liberal position, namely that market competition brings prosperity (Tribe, "political Economy of Modernity"). The Freiburg school saw monopolies and cartels as a threat, and advocated humanistic, social values. In other words, "neo" liberals were attempting to make positive improvements to classical liberalism; they saw an unfettered faith in the free market as out of date, and pejoratively classified those who believed in it as "paleo-liberals" (Boas and Gans-Morse, "Neoliberalism"). Economic theories that Progressives would today characterize as neoliberal were taken up by Chilean economists trained according to the Chicago school who admired the "German Miracle" post– World War II. These economists studied under Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and implemented "rapid and extensive privatization, deregulation, and reductions in trade barriers" when they returned to Chile (Boas and Gans-Morse, "Neoliberalism," 15). While these practices differed greatly from the original normative ideology advocated by the Freiburg school, they took its name and became the first wave of a major reorganization of governments and political markets that would characterize the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 764