http://socialistproject.ca/documents/AusterityAgainstDemocracy.pdf

Austerity Against Democracy:
An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism?

From its very beginnings, the new doctrine was quite consciously set in opposition to socialism as an alternate economic and democratic order to capitalism and as an unyielding defender of the institutions of private property. In its specific programmatic mandate, neoliberalism was an offspring of the Great Depression and set against Keynesian state intervention. But however much its protagonists set themselves up as outsiders, neoliberalism was never an alien political doctrine to economic and political elites of Western Europe and North America: neoliberal ideas were always incorporated as a legitimate component of state policy discussions.
This pamphlet is part of the Socialist Interventions series, written by Greg Albo and Carlo Fanelli (Aug. 2014).

“From its very beginnings, the new
doctrine was quite consciously set in
opposition to socialism as an alternate
economic and democratic order to capitalism
and as an unyielding defender of the
institutions of private property. In its specific
programmatic mandate, neoliberalism was
an offspring of the Great Depression and set
against Keynesian state intervention. But
however much its protagonists set
themselves up as outsiders, neoliberalism
was never an alien political doctrine to
economic and political elites of Western
Europe and North America: neoliberal ideas
were always incorporated as a legitimate
component of state policy discussions.”

Neoliberalism and Austerity

The practice of neoliberalism is many-sided, exhibiting institutional variation and alternate policy modalities across geographic regions and scales of the state. The entire spectrum of political parties, moreover, has been comprised in governing as neoliberal administrations. This is, in many ways, quite startling. For the theoretical origins of neoliberalism can be traced back to the 1930s to a tiny eccentric group of liberal intellectuals meeting in Paris to discuss the prospects for war and the threats posed, as they saw it, by ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘collectivist planning’
(Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). Their emergent ‘new’ liberalism incorporated marginalist economic thought from the late 19th century with a political philosophy rooted in late 18th century Western Europe. From its very beginnings, the new doctrine was quite consciously set in opposition
to socialism as an alternate economic and democratic order to capitalism and as an unyielding defender of the institutions of private property.