The one thing that you can be sure of when delving into the vast literature on neoliberalism is that the definition of the term will be contested. It seems that no two authors define neoliberalism in exactly the same way, which makes discussions of the concept and its history difficult, at best. “Neoliberalism is anything but a succinct, clearly defined political philosophy” (Plehwe 2009: 1). (See Rodgers 2018 for a discussion of the difficulties involved in defining neoliberalism.)
In his new book, Gary Gerstle attempts to cut through the layers of disagreement and cross-talk to offer a definitive political history of neoliberalism in the United States. The key to Gerstle's approach is to examine what he terms the “neoliberal political order” (emphasis added). Gerstle and his coeditor Steve Fraser (Fraser and Gerstle 1989) pioneered the use of the concept of a “political order” to study how a...
