Possibly because of the considerable time lag between the genesis and conspicuous impact of neoliberal development economics, historiographers following Toye (1993) have dated the rise of the alleged neoliberal “counterrevolution” to the late 1970s and early 1980s. By those years, Thatcher and Reagan had been elected, and hence powerful right-wing arguments in favor of free market capitalism were being made in the analysis of the global debt crisis (Colclough 1991; Toye 1993; Leys 1996). Until the late 1970s, even critical scholars like Robert Cox (1979) did not identify a neoliberal camp as such when trying to describe major discourse coalitions in development.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1265