What are we talking about when we talk about neoliberalism?: Thoughts occasioned by Roads to Economization

10 February 2026

At the end of 2025, Modern British History published Charles Troup’s article ‘Roads to Economization: Valuing Life, Limb, and Leisure in the Social Democratic State’, which was awarded the 2024 Duncan Tanner Essay Prize. The article, which is well worth the read, draws on the work of Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist, to challenge the established history of neoliberalism in Britain, identifying practices and policies in British public administration commonly associated with neoliberalism as predating Thatcher’s governments from 1979 and Thatcherism.

Initially, I felt certain bemusement. At the beginning of 2025 I had published my own article, well worth the read, which draws on the work of Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist to challenge the established history of neoliberalism in Britain, identifying practices and policies in British public administration commonly associated with neoliberalism as predating Thatcher’s governments from 1979 and Thatcherism.

The more I thought about the articles, the more I was struck by a contrast. While Troup positions their article as against neoliberalism as explanation, I tend to see my article is broadly compatible and instead a modification of the neoliberalism argument.[1] In spite of ostensibly similar arguments, we arrive at very different conclusions. This opens up a bigger topic that I am interested in, which is apprehension or opposition among historians of modern Britain to neoliberalism as an analytical frame or concept. Although there have been many really great contributions to the history of neoliberalism by modern British historians or based on the history of modern Britain, I regularly sense resistance to invoking the term as well as the common claims of it being overly genericised, imprecise and misleading. As someone who positions much of his work as within a history of neoliberalism, I have a fair amount tied up in pushing against these claims. I indeed think the intellectual history of neoliberalism, as well as many work of political history, have rejected this dated critiques. Comparing my article to Troup’s can help explore where I see an important distinction that might be worth sharing.

Let’s start out by acknowledging the differences in the cases explored in the articles. Troup explores economisation and efficiency while I examine the histories of managerialism and privatisation. Troup explores the 1950s I explore the late 1960s and early 1970s. Where they look at the Road Research Laboratory, a public research institution, I look at the Central Policy Review Staff. Perhaps most crucially, they examined their case as a development within social democracy while I see my development as coming from the political.

This hints a bit at the different political arguments that might be seen as animating the articles (I don’t know Troup so can’t claim to speak for them). A lazy reader might claim this is a matter of neoliberal ideas appearing on the right being classified as neoliberal and bad while on the left they are something esoteric and different, but I think that’s a misleading characterisation.

I understand Troup’s article to be making the case that elements of economisation and efficiency are not the exclusive elements of neoliberalism and instead can be incorporated as elements of a social democratic governance regime. This is not an empty argument. Aaron Benanev has recently been making similar claims as part of his call for a ‘multi-criterial economy’. If an alternative system to neoliberalism is to come to govern, something genuinely post-neoliberal, it will have to use some public administration tools without being characterised as neoliberals in disguise. Seeking to have efficient and effective public services will likely be part of this framework. I think this is the source of many historians’ apprehensions with commentary on neoliberalism. While we might correctly characterise neoliberalism as related to the political economy of late capitalism, it is unhelpful to characterise all of capitalism as neoliberal.

My article, by contrast, wants to identify a political motivation behind the managerial reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s, challenging their characterisation as apolitical technocracy. I also want to draw attention to the bubbling conceptual discourse of the Conservative Party in this period, identifying the moment of Thatcher’s ascendancy to office in 1979 as not the beginning of neoliberalism in Britain but rather the culmination of a particular phase of pre-existing history – I am often keen to emphasise the origins of neoliberalism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Let us move on with the cases. Troup’s emphasis on economisation draws attention to how efficiency, cost benefit analysis, marketisation calculation have been associated with neoliberalism. What matters is what one is doing with these tools. Troup indicates that these methods were used to develop a social democratic governmentality as planners sought to better carry out planning by adopting a common criterion from evaluating competing demands for state resources. Through the introduction of economisation and cost benefit analysis, decisive judgements could be made. By using these tools for planning, they are using tools we associate with neoliberal governance for exactly that regime we use as a foil for neoliberalism, namely social democratic planning.

There seems to be a significant jump here in the argument Troup positions themselves against, that I’m not sure really holds. This lies in the claim that markets, cost-benefit, efficiency, and economisation are inherently neoliberal. While Troup does reference legitimate literature while making this case this seems out of step with the existing a developed history of neoliberalism scholarship. Here we misidentify the symptoms of neoliberalism for its causes.

The working definition I have been using for neoliberalism lately is something along the lines of state action to create the conditions for market competition. This reflect the origins of neoliberalism out of an attempt to renew liberalism after the failings of the 1930s and in the light of rising socialism. Here, the new neoliberals recognised that laissez faire liberalism had failed and that leaving market forces to themselves would lead to capture either by corrupt forces of capital or redistributive forces of labour. A useful characterisation is that neoliberals emerged out of the recognition that market models imperfectly model economic and social reality – their gap from ‘classical liberalism’. In response, neoliberals looked to correct this error; not by fixing their models but by fixing the society in the confidence that the market/competition model was normatively correct. As such they sought to utilise the state to actively protect market forces against both, liberating a particular form of capitalism. Here we have Andrew Gamble’s classic characterisation of the linking of a strong state and a free economy.

My reading is that Troup draws on a Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism and its legacies within sociological accounts of neoliberalism, which have looked at the subjectivities of neoliberal governance by looking at the effects of neoliberalism. This approach is very useful at looking at how neoliberalism trickles down into personal experiences and logics of governance. If markets and competition are normative, we are socialised to optimise our behaviour to best achieve our ends, to better function within a competitive system. Cost-benefit and economisation are thus tools for neoliberalism but not neoliberal themselves. Consider a prospective automobile purchaser, who may identify a VW Golf as more fuel efficient option than a Ford Raptor. It would be inane to claim that the Golf represents a ‘neoliberal’ choice, even as the purchaser optimises their spending on certain criteria.

Let us compare this to the case in my article, on the introduction of programme budgeting to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an approach to government budgeting and organisation that drew on a similar insight to that which Troup identifies, and which is important in the Berman book, that money could be a common criterion of comparison across cases and thus obliviate the necessity for overly complex modelling and subject specific knowledge. By identifying clear governing goals, budgeting and analysis of the efficiency of spending could lead to a more effective governance mode. This is all similar.

What I identify in the article is a political project underpinning the introduction of this approach to British public administration. The Public Sector Research Unit, which worked hard to develop the underlying proposals and went on trips to the US to learn from American systems analysts, explicitly understood their project as a means to constrain the size and scope of the state. They explicitly call for reviews of whether existing programmes should be carried out in their existing manner, whether they should be carried out by state at all and whether some should be jettisoned. Programme budgeting was not just a tool for the effective manager but a key front in transforming the shape and function of the administrative state.

Here, there is a tricky relationship with the neoliberal thought collective, the transnational intellectual network centred around the Mont Pelerin society that scholars of neoliberalism use to explore the intellectual history of neoliberalism – key nodes in Britain include the CPS, ASI and IEA. This approach of programme budgeting does not seem to come from the neoliberal networks and its logics and reasoning are actually very different from what we see as the neoliberal arguments around government design from the 1970s. This is not a case of the neoliberal movement pushing a policy before the Thatcherite revolution. However, it is also not not neoliberal. The driving force behind programme budgeting in the UK, David Howell, was part of neoliberal networks, publishing with the IEA, in close networks with the CPS and an advocate for forms of neoliberalism. Howell and many of the actors involves with the CPRS are also very active within what we have later seen as Thatcherite programmes in politics and administration. This is best exemplified by the concept of privatisation, which the PSRU introduces into political discourse and which is quickly adopted by neoliberals. I see this history as slightly modifying the story of neoliberalism but still very much fitting in.

I want to draw attention to a classical work in the political science of neoliberalism in Britain, Hall, 1993. This isn’t the work of Stuart Hall, but rather Peter Hall on policy paradigms and economic policy making. Although Hall’s historical account in the article has been challenged in subsequent scholarship, the underlying conceptual framework is still helpful. Hall draws on the Kuhnian notion of scientific paradigms to describe policy paradigms and three orders of policy change. First order change is characterised by changes within an established policy tool, consider adjustments to the level of universal credit in pursuit of desired outcomes. Second order change involves changing tools used to achieve a political aim. Perhaps a department introduces a new tax or changes from focusing on the demand side of an issue to the supply side. These can all be done within an established policy paradigm. Third order change, which Hall uses to examine Thatcherism involves a change in not just targets or tools but the overall paradigm and goals for policy makers.

Here we can think of Troup’s case as innovating on the tools available to administrators but remaining within a social democratic paradigm by sharing the established end goals and vision for policy-making. My case involves the attempt to transform the overall system and replace the goals underlying governance with new ones. This is perfectly captured in a quote I include in the article:

The emphasis on introducing outsiders into the Government machine is not to attempt to make the Civil Service more efficient – civil servants are thoroughly aware of the need for efficiency and indeed they are extremely intelligent, hard working and in every way competent – but it is to question the policy assumptions on which so many activities are based. (Schreiber to Jellicoe, 1970 cited in Lowe 2011, p.173)

As such, I want to suggest to scholars of modern British history that they should re-evaluate their thinking on neoliberalism as an analytical framework. Understanding neoliberalism as just a political slogan, about capitalism, markets and efficiency does not really engage with the vibrant literature on the topic and I think scholarship that rests on such a footing, batting away a caricature of neoliberal scholarship can be intellectually impoverished as a result. Engaging with the intellectual history of neoliberalism and the history of neoliberal policy and politics that interacts with it can better reflect the historical phenomena we seek to understand. Yes this involves separating the wheat from the chaff and re-approaching literatures we may have once dismissed, but this is the case with many historiographies and there are plenty of great works to draw from.

[1] I did actually try to avoid making direct comments on the history of neoliberalism in the article as I will try to touch on a bit more here. This was in part a matter of not being certain on what my position really is/was but also because it introduces some messiness that would have been difficult to address within the word count.