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Towards the Centre: Early Neoliberals in the Netherlands and the Rise of the Welfare State, 1945–1958

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2019

Bram Mellink
Bram Mellink*
Affiliation:
Department of History, European Studies and Religion Studies, Kloveniersburgwal 48, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1012 CX, the Netherlands
*
*brammellink@uva.nl
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Abstract

Although scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the history of neoliberalism, the ‘breakthrough’ of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan still captures most of their attention. Consequently, the neoliberal project is primarily taken as Anglo-American, while its early history is mostly studied to explain the political shift of the 1980s. This article focuses on the early neoliberal movement in the Netherlands (1945–58) to highlight the continental European roots of neoliberal thought, trace the remarkably wide dissemination of neoliberal ideas in Dutch socio-economic debates and highlight the key role of these ideas in the conceptualisation of the Western European welfare state.

Type
Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 30 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Peter van Dam, Ido de Haan, Kees-Jan van Klaveren, Mart Rutjes, Markha Valenta, Naomi Woltring, the participants in the workshop ‘The Values of Neoliberalism’ (November 2017) and the editors and reviewers for their constructive criticism and helpful comments. This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant 317-52-010.

References

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31 Jamie Peck, ‘Remaking Laissez-Faire’, Progress in Human Geography 32, 3 (2008) 3–43, here 11.

32 Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 197.

33 This database includes sixteen national and regional newspapers for the period 1945 to 1958. By keying in the names of forty-eight authors, which I extracted from the publication list provided by the Committee for Economic Orders I selected 3,200 newspaper articles, which I read manually.

34 In comparison: the name of Willem Drees, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1958, generated 40,000 hits.

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45 See the electoral programme of the liberal Freedom Party (1946), 3 at http://pubnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/verkiezingsprogramma/TK/pvdv1946/pvdv46.pdf (last visited 1 May 2017).

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52 Ibid., 198.

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66 See Christoffer Green-Pedersen, The Politics of Justification: Party Competition and Welfare State Retrenchment in Denmark and the Netherlands from 1982 to 1998 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 87–8; Nico A. Siegel, ‘Jenseits der Expansion? Sozialpolitik in westlichen Demokratien, 1975–1995’, in Manfred G. Schmidt eds., Wohlfahrsstaatliche Politik, Institutionen, Prozesse, Leistungsprofil (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2001) 54–89; Sjoerd Karsten, ‘Neoliberal Education Reforms in The Netherlands’, Comparative Education 35, 3 (1999) 303–17; Hellema, Nederland en de jaren zeventig, 289.

67 Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility; Spicka, Selling the Economic Miracle.