On the other hand, more serious analysts recognize that neoliberalism names a diverse but coherent set of policy tools, grounded in a set of clearly articulated core values. On the one hand, there are those who dismiss it as a meaningless leftist slur, invented by Bernie Bros to denigrate Hillary Clinton. Particularly since the Global Financial Crisis and the 2016 election, “neoliberalism” has become a very contentious term.

His outlook has formed part of the philosophical underpinning of the neoliberal order, which has held sway over public policy and business practices for four decades, with a record of ever-increasing inequality, accelerating economic degradation, and perpetual crisis. Yet Friedman’s ideas have served as more than just fodder for dorm room “bull sessions”-a use for his book that Friedman explicitly anticipates in his 1982 preface.

Indeed, even to this day, his book has often served to introduce young people (particularly young men) to libertarianism, providing a kind of “theory of everything” that explains both why society is going wrong (not enough markets) and how to solve social problems (more markets). Undaunted, Friedman presented himself as an evangelist bringing the gospel of the free market to an unsuspecting world. This year represents a particularly inauspicious milestone: the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. When it originally appeared, the postwar political settlement based on the New Deal was at the height of its power and popularity, and Friedman’s pro-market polemic could be dismissed as the work of a crank.

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