Neoliberalism Against Social Democracy

This paper takes its point of departure in recent literature around the Mont Pèlerin Society and the construction of the new Nobel Prize in economics, which was awarded to Milton Friedman in 1976. By following the reception of Friedman’s Prize in the Swedish debate, I argue that neoliberalism in Sweden was not a product of transnational circulation, but of endogenous debate and dissident economists in the mature social democrat welfare state. In the final section, I discuss the difference between social democracy and neoliberalism as ideal type construction and as empirical phenomenon, and I suggest that once the central idea of a social form of democracy was lost, social democracy could become neoliberal.