We can sympathize with an impatience for those who use the term “neoliberalism” as a blanket swearword for everything they despise, or a brainless synonym for modern capitalism. The problem of conflating globalized capitalism and neoliberalism after the era of social liberalism amounts to the overspecification problem, and refrains from considering (neoliberal) hegemonic constellations (Plehwe, Walpen, and Neunhöffer 2006). Of course there is no such thing as “pure markets” and therefore “always embedded neoliberalism” (Cahill 2014), but this could be considered a problem with Karl Polanyi’s understanding of markets and classical liberal market ideology, not ours—and as a matter of fact, not of the Mont Pèlerin Society members, either.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 25