by Alexandre Aloy
Over the last decade, certain political theorists and critical political economists have increasingly used the term “authoritarian neoliberalism”—sometimes shortened to “authoritarian liberalism”—to make sense of the current political moment. This paradoxical term denotes the conjunction of free-market economics and authoritarian politics that emerged in many capitalist states across the globe following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. By employing this concept, scholars intend to capture the shift towards more undemocratic and coercive forms of neoliberalism. Building on these discussions, this think-piece is threefold: (1) to elucidate how this concept has been used as a tool in political economy to explain concrete evolutions in neoliberal governance, (2) to expose its long-standing intellectual history, and (3) to critically interrogate some of its blind spots. Does this provocative concept really capture something new about our era, or does it obscure more than it reveals?
“Authoritarian (Neo)Liberalism” in the Current Context
In the scholarship that documents authoritarian neoliberalism’s presumable global spread, the European Union post-financial crisis represents the paradigmatic case (Bonefeld 2017; Bruff 2016, 107-117; Somek 2015; Streeck 2015). Yet, the phenomenon extends far beyond Brussels, as researchers also apply the concept across other contexts: France under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency (Chavagneux 2023; Monod 2019, 253-264), Finland under Petteri Orpo’s coalition government (Kyrronen 2023), and Serbia under Aleksandar Vučić’s government (Lynch 2023). The concept has also been used to characterize the much discussed authoritarian shifts in Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party and Tayyip Erdoğan (Tansel 2018) as well as Hungary under Viktor Orbán (Fabry 2019). Outside Europe, studies observe the emergence of authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil under the Temer administration (Sondergaard 2021) and Jair Bolsonaro’s regime (Saad-Filho 2021, 97-111), in Indonesia under Joko Widodo’s presidency (Karim and Kholid 2025), and even Javier Milei’s radical free-market program in Argentina (Ferre 2025; Sanmartino 2024).
The political economist Ian Bruff, who was instrumental in popularizing the term, defines authoritarian neoliberalism as “the reconfiguring of the state into a less democratic entity through constitutional and legal changes that seek to insulate it from social and political conflict” (Bruff 2014, 113). This depiction provides two crucial features of authoritarian neoliberalism in practice. First, it describes the insulation of the state and the economic order from democratic demands, which is a largely shared observation: for instance, Michael Wilkinson indicates that authoritarian liberalism aims to “tak[e] economic matters out of the public domain of democratic power and accountability” (Wilkinson 2021, 3), while Wolfgang Streeck depicts its main thrust as “the insulation of a politically instituted market economy from democratic politics” (Streeck 2015, 365). The second feature, perhaps more surprisingly, is the undemocratic reconfiguration of the state achieved through constitutional and legal transformations.
While authoritarian neoliberalism can involve direct repression, surveillance, and coercion against dissent from above—as seen in the crackdown on France’s “Yellow Vests” movement (Trouillard 2022)—it is not necessarily reducible to it. As Bruff emphasizes, authoritarianism here means more than “the exercise of brute coercive force”; in fact, it manifests in attempts to “insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent” (Bruff 2014, 120). Thus, authoritarian neoliberalism goes beyond using state power to break through political contestation to impose economic liberalization and dismantle social policies. Rather, its preferred strategy is to prevent deliberation and contestation from occurring in the first place by pre-emptively imposing measures that seek to lock in authoritarian policies under the concealment neoliberal governance.
Institutionally, authoritarian liberalism translates into “the constitutional entrenchment of economic liberties vis-à-vis legislatures or trade unions and in institutions that shift control of economic or monetary governance from the people to expert bodies and to the executive branch” (Somek 2015, 357). Out of this arises three main aspects of the state’s reconfiguration: (1) subordination of the state to constitutional and legal rules; (2) transfer of economic policymaking to non-democratic institutions; (3) concentration of power in the executive and marginalization of the parliament. These dimensions find many contemporary instantiations. Constitutional amendments imposing a balanced-budget or a debt-ceiling to constrain parliamentary power in economic decision-making are a prime example of the first aspect (e.g. Bruff 2014, 122-124). Granting greater independence to central banks for policymaking is also an illustration of this. According to Werner Bonefeld, these policy choices exemplify a larger trend of “institutional attempts […] at removing democratic oversight over significant elements of political decision-making to rule-based, extra-democratic technocratic institutions” (Bonefeld 2017, 756). Finally, the bypassing of parliament through decrees and/or emergency legislation only epitomizes the concentration of executive power (Cozzolino 2019, Chamayou 2020, 58-59).
“Authoritarian (Neo)liberalism” in Intellectual History
The popularity of “authoritarian (neo)liberalism” to describe contemporary evolutions should not lead us to think that it is altogether new. The term “authoritarian liberalism” has a long pedigree in intellectual history. It finds mention in the context of a crumbling Weimar Republic, during a controversy between Carl Schmitt and Hermann Heller. The latter, a prominent socio-democrat jurist of the time, coined the term “authoritarian liberalism” in response to a speech delivered by Schmitt in November 1932 entitled “Strong State and Sound Economy” (in Cristi 1998, 212-232). At that time, Schmitt was an important ally to the von Papen government, which had just resigned after months of governing through emergency decrees to liberalize the economy, largely using Article 48 of the German Constitution to bypass the Parliament (see Chamayou 2020, 53-59). Heller forged this paradoxical concept to describe Schmitt and von Papen’s project as one fusing the conservative advocacy for an ‘authoritarian state’ with the liberal slogan “Freedom of the economy from the State!” (Heller 2015, 299).
More recently, political theorists returned to the origins of this concept to claim that authoritarian liberalism is also an apt way to describe neoliberal theory, especially as articulated by Friedrich Hayek and the German ordoliberals. On this account, the practice of authoritarian neoliberalism finds its roots in the neoliberal corpus. In effect, scholars identified strong affinities between key figures of German ordoliberalism, one of the main ‘varieties’ of neoliberalism exemplified by the likes of Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke, and Schmitt (Bonefeld 2017; Chamayou 2020). They noted that both ordoliberals and Schmitt blamed the economic and political crisis of their time on the ‘degeneration’ of the Weimar democracy into a ‘pluralistic democracy’ where the state became too weak to have an autonomous economic policy. In that setting, the state becomes the ‘prey’ of organized ‘interest groups’ (e.g. trade-unions), which use the state to their advantage, forcing it to intervene in every sector of society.
The ordoliberals, following Schmitt’s analysis, denounced this new state as a ‘total state,’ over-extending its functions because of its weakness. Instead, what a free economy requires, they argued, is a ‘strong state’: a state limited to instituting, protecting, and policing the market order, but also strong in carrying out these functions. This state ought to be able to extract itself from its economic role by resisting mass democratic demands for state intervention. ‘A strong state for a free economy’ was therefore the slogan of this authoritarian liberalism (Bonefeld 2017; Streeck 2015 ; Wilkinson 2013).
In addition, scholars showed the proximity between Hayek, the most renowned neoliberal theorist, and Schmitt; an “unholy alliance,” to use William Scheuerman’s expression, which makes it possible to “understan[d] the “elective affinity” between free market economics and authoritarian politics that has become so common in the contemporary political universe” (Scheuerman 1997, 184; Cristi 1998 ; Chamayou 2020, 73-77). Connecting this long-standing history to contemporary phenomena, Streeck notes for instance that “[t]oday the European Union […] closely follows the liberal-authoritarian template as devised by Schmitt and others in the final years of the Weimar Republic” (Streeck 2015, 361).
“Authoritarian (Neo)Liberalism”: Interrogating the Concept
Despite providing sharp insights to analyze neoliberal practice and theory, the concept of “authoritarian neoliberalism” also raises several challenging questions. First, there is the issue of periodization and whether authoritarian neoliberalism is new. As recalled by Thomas Biebricher, “[t]he relation between neoliberalism and democracy has always been fraught with tensions” (Biebricher 2015, 255). For instance, Chile under Pinochet’s military dictatorship—neoliberalism’s first “experiment.” To account for this, Bruff indicates that post-2007 neoliberal practice is “qualitatively distinct” because its authoritarian tendencies “have come to the fore through the shift toward constitutional and legal mechanisms and the move away from seeking consent for hegemonic projects” (Bruff 2014, 116). Nonetheless, using the example of Thatcherism, on the other side of the Atlantic, Matthew Ryan underscores that “using legal and constitutional measures to foreclose democratic contestation of policy […] played a key role in the birth of neoliberalism” (Ryan 2019, 126), challenging a presumable ‘qualitative’ shift.
Thus, some scholars prefer to use the term “authoritarian liberalism” (rather than “authoritarian neoliberalism”) to emphasize the continuity between this concept’s theoretical formulations in the 1920s-1930s by Schmitt and the ordoliberals with its many-fold instantiations, from the last years of the Weimar Republic to the construction of the European Union and beyond. Yet, this raises a second problem, namely the common application of this term to widely different cases. I suggest that the over-extension of this concept speaks to the under-definition of the two terms that constitute it, as there remains indeterminacy on the meaning of authoritarian and what remains of liberalism in such “authoritarian liberalism.” After all, liberalism is conceptually and historically opposed to authoritarianism. Bringing in the intellectual history of this concept also highlights yet another problem raised by scholars: while many accounts attribute a prominent role to Carl Schmitt in the genealogy of authoritarian liberalism, Schmitt himself was resolutely anti-liberal (Audier 2022; Lacroix 2021).
If we return to Heller’s initial formulation, “authoritarian liberalism” is authoritarian for its “anti-democratic basis” and liberal in how it relates to the economy (Heller 2015, 295, 299). This aligns with contemporary uses such as Wilkinson’s, for whom this term “captures the phenomenon of a liberalism that is pursued by authoritarian means,” specifying that “‘authoritarian’ is understood here in opposition and contrast to democratic government and particularly to democratic change,” while it “is liberal in the sense that it depoliticizes the economy, naturalizes inequalities, and values markets, competition, and private ownership” (Wilkinson 2021, 3, 5). Yet, this amounts to a rather reductive view of liberalism, with no mention of political liberalism at all. In that respect, one might follow Justine Lacroix’s assessment that “it is not enough to be a defender of the market to be a “liberal” (Lacroix 2021, 509).
Thus, the term authoritarian liberalism can only apply to a liberalism that gives prevalence to economic liberty above all else, a feature often associated with neoliberal authors but not beyond them. Indeed, such conviction accounts for the endorsement of authoritarianism by certain neoliberals, notably Hayek who notoriously claimed preferring “a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking in liberalism” (in Biebricher 2020, 11) and acquiesced to Pinochet’s dictatorship for that very reason. Yet, Lacroix notes, rather than giving rise to an “authoritarian liberalism,” such acquiescence to dictatorships reveals the “self-destruction of a liberalism that allows itself to be subverted by market fundamentalism” (Lacroix 2021, 510; my translation). Crucially, then, this issue raises the larger point of whether we should speak of capitalism rather than liberalism (Pranchere 2024, 30). That neoliberalism is not necessarily authoritarian, as exemplified by “Third Way” neoliberalism in the 1990s, can also point in that direction.
This leads to a final interrogation: why and in what ways is this (neo)liberalism authoritarian? As indicated earlier, for contemporary authors this authoritarian character predominantly lies in the subordination of the state to constitutional and legal constraints, in particular, with the constitutionalization of economic policies. Importantly, this differs and goes beyond Heller’s original formulation, according to which the authoritarian state “means autocratic state authority versus democratic state authority” (Heller 2015, 295). Yet, whether what is now characterized as ‘authoritarian’ deserves this label is debatable: as noted by Jean-Yves Pranchère, while we might want the economy to remain a subject of democratic deliberation, the constitutional order “cannot be described as ‘authoritarian’” (Pranchere 2024, 29). In itself, Pranchère’s assessment might not tell the whole story, if only because one can envisage an illiberal constitution (e.g. one enforcing religious conformity) (Alviar Garcia and Frankenberg 2019; Tushnet 2015). Nonetheless, it points to the fact that the concept of authoritarian liberalism raises anew the age-old debates about the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism and the conditions in which constitutionalism can turn undemocratic and/or authoritarian.
Ultimately, consciously or not, scholars using the concept of authoritarian (neo)liberalism tend to largely rely on an assumption inherited from Heller, namely, the conviction that the authoritarian-liberal state must be authoritarian because the people would not tolerate it for long in democratic forms (Heller 2015, 300). In continuity, Grégoire Chamayou analyzes that “[i]t is because its economic program tends to be overwhelmingly rejected that the neoliberal state is striving to push it through authoritatively” (Chamayou 2020, 82). By relying on this assumption, this concept misses the populist potentiality of neoliberal discourse (Biebricher 2020; Brandes 2020, 61-88; Slobodian 2020), that we found in Thatcherism and aptly described as an “authoritarian populism” by Stuart Hall (Hall 1988), and perhaps even today with Milei in Argentina.
Conclusion
In sum, these blind spots highlight the importance of intellectual history in bringing clarity to contemporary political configurations. Using the concept of “authoritarian neoliberalism” to characterize the post-2007 financial crisis conjuncture raises the question of what distinguishes it from previous iterations of neoliberal governance. Alternatively, preferring “authoritarian liberalism” to emphasize the longer pedigree of the association between liberalism and authoritarianism raises the question of how something can be liberal and authoritarian at once. In both cases, these terms raise the questions of (1) what kind of liberalism remains in “authoritarian neoliberalism”/“authoritarian liberalism” and (2) what meaning is attached to “authoritarian,” and whether this qualifier is warranted.
Yet, these blind spots, while real, should not obfuscate what the concept of “authoritarian (neo)liberalism” reveals about neoliberalism in the present moment and in its longer trajectory. In particular, it underlines the crucial role and reconfiguration of the state in neoliberal thought and practice (cf. Cahill 2015; Davies 2018, 273-283; Gamble 1979), against misleading representations and discourses about neoliberalism’s ‘state phobia,’ ‘laissez-faire,’ and ‘free-market’ (Bruff and Starnes 2019). In depicting the legal and constitutional transformations behind neoliberal governance, this concept also highlights the reworking of constitutionalism in neoliberal theory and its importance to entrench the neoliberal order (Slobodian 2018; Gill 1998).
By putting front and center the often-eluded question of the relation between the economic structure and the political structure, while critically interrogating the coupling of liberalism and democracy, this concept forces us to reflect on larger questions: First, what is (or should be) the place of economic freedom in liberalism? In the contemporary scholarship dissecting the “crisis of liberalism” and its remedies tends to be sidelined (e.g. Cherniss 2021; Moyn 2022). Historically, in response to the crisis of liberalism of their time, neoliberal authors from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman built their liberalism on the premise that economic liberty is not only part and parcel of individual freedom, but also a necessary condition for political liberalism. While we saw that such argument could lead them to support political authoritarianism in the name of economic liberty, criticizing their position does not lead by itself to a conclusion on the proper place of economic freedom within the larger liberal framework. Should we even reconceive of the concept of authoritarianism in light of neoliberal practice? In that respect, while the scholarship on democratic backsliding and the “crisis of democracy” overwhelmingly focuses on the populist threat (e.g. Norris 2019; Galston 2018; Urbinati 2019), it might very well be, as suggested by the concept of “authoritarian (neo)liberalism,” that populism is only one face of contemporary authoritarianisms.
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Alexandre Aloy is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined this institution after obtaining his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris. His dissertation project explores the place of neoliberal theory within the liberal tradition. In particular, it tracks continuities and discontinuities between neoliberal thinkers and 19th century liberal political thought to re-assess the contemporary scholarship on neoliberalism.
Edited by Andrew Gibson
Featured image: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, “Wuxtry!” (1939) The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
