The Neoliberal Transition in Intellectual and Economic History

This review essay examines three recent books about the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that after three decades of scholarship that have mapped neoliberalism as a set of policies and an epoch, we are now witnessing a new turn in the literature focused on understanding why neoliberalism came to dominate the global political and economic order in the first place. This more ambitious agenda opens up complex questions of agency, intentionality, and causality. The "neoliberal transition debate" therefore concerns the dominant philosophy of history among intellectual and economic historians.