Contrary to the claims of our Wiki-workers, when the early MPS members cast about for a label to attach to the as-yet amorphous doctrine they had set out to construct, more often than not they did resort to the term neoliberalism in the early years of its existence. In French, the term was being used by the circles around the participants in the Colloque Walter Lippmann in the 1930s. Milton Friedman even used the term in the title of an early survey of the efforts of his comrades (1951). What has led so many subsequent commentators astray is the fact that most MPS members stopped using the term some time in the later 1950s. Indeed, at that juncture they ceased insisting that a rupture with the doctrines of classical liberalism was called for. This decision to support a public stance that the liberalism they championed was an effectively continuous political doctrine from the eighteenth century all the way through to their own revisionist meditations (such as endless paeans that it was all in Adam Smith) and therefore required no special neologism, turned out to be one of a number of precarious balancing acts performed in the course of constructing neoliberalism at the MPS.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2110