Quinn Slobodian, Priya Lal, Gary Gerstle and Tehila Sasson in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society:
[Quinn Slobodian] Until very recently, to talk about the category of neoliberalism in the discipline of history was to describe an absence. While the term experienced rapid adoption in the adjacent fields of geography, anthropology and sociology in the early millennium, it remained a piece of jargon too far for most historians, who are temperamentally leery of what they perceive as trendy terminology and prefer their research to be implicitly rather than explicitly informed by theoretical work. Yet the last decade has seen the category of neoliberalism tiptoeing into the work of historians too. The term ‘neoliberal’ appeared in the title of an article in American Historical Review and Past & Present for the first time in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Angus Burgin’s intellectual history of neoliberalism, The Great Persuasion, won the Merle Curti Award for best book in intellectual history; Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award; my own book – with neoliberalism in its title – received a prize from the American Historical Association; and the book of another contributor to this forum, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.
How can we explain the creeping mainstreaming of neoliberalism for historians? One reason is external to the university. Broader public debates in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the Eurozone crisis and the responding political formations of Occupy and the ‘movements of the squares’ injected an activist strain inside the academy among graduate students who, in some cases, are now junior professors or postdoctoral scholars with their first books published. More senior scholars have also responded to the zeitgeist. To offer one prominent example, the economic historian Adam Tooze, who largely eschewed the category of neoliberalism in his earlier work, made it central in his more recent publications. Despite its periodic denunciations as a category by some senior historians and the preference of others to handle it only with the tongs of scare quotes, neoliberalism has shown its traction as a concept deployed by people to make sense of a present where people’s life chances seem constrained by a capitalist framework beyond the power of any individual or single state.
More here.
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