Neoliberalism turns out to be anything but an easily and clearly defined contemporary political philosophy once we venture beyond popular representations, such as market radicalism, neoclassical economics, monetarism, or the journalistic mania for attributing coherent thought systems to politicians: Thatcherism, Reaganism, and Howardism, to name but a few. When the Zapatista movement called for global resistance against the NAFTA project in 1994 and sparked resistance to corporate globalization in general, neoliberalism was widely identified with U.S. superpower, unilateralism, and sometimes a forbidding borderless "global empire" (Hardt and Negri 2000). The puckish Slavoj Zizek has glossed neoliberalism as the doctrine, "You are free to do anything as long as it involves shopping." Leading intellectuals of the left thus have frequently, if unwittingly, contributed to the great confusion surrounding neoliberalism. More recently, David Harvey (2005) has simply conflated neoliberalism with neoclassical economics. Earlier, Pierre Bourdieu (1998) and his followers popularized the notion of "pensée unique" or "strong discourse," where neoliberalism amounts to nothing more than a bland version of economism.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2097