Varieties of neoliberalism: On the populism of laissez-faire in America, 1960-1985

A populist turn in the argument for laissez-faire occurred between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. The essay focuses on Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, the supply-side economists, and eulogists of free enterprise like Michael Novak. They reversed the standpoint of previous advocates of the minimal state, who had feared that the enfranchised poor majority would soak the rich, by arguing that the statist danger came in fact from the liberal elites, pressing on with the expansion of governmental functions against the will and interests of ordinary Americans. Such a shift complemented that occurring in the idiom of the political Right since the 1960s. The economic populism of Friedman and Buchanan, in particular, derived from a blend of abstract analysis and a reassertion of freedom as the constitutive value of the country – they combined the universality and prestige of the economic idiom with a normative vision of national identity.