In or around 1980, the political economy of Latin America underwent major transformations; their nature, however, is often contested and elusive. This roundtable will discuss whether “neoliberalism” is a useful or a misleading category to describe and understand these changes, featuring historians of financialization, consumer capitalism, central banks, global commodity flows, and the welfare state. The roundtable’s geographical scope covers Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico — as well as the U.S. and Japan, enabling an exploration of how macroeconomic transformations in capitalism’s core also impacted Latin America.

The concept of neoliberalism elicits many questions: is it an intellectual movement, a set of economic policies, a logic of state (in)action, a mode of insertion in the global economy, or just a bad category? Should Latin Americanists engage with neoliberalism differently from scholars of other continents? Can the region claim to have been home to the first experiments in neoliberalism, which would then influence the rest of the world? While these questions are often asked in purely semantic debates or in the context of intellectual history, in this roundtable they will guide a discussion about the causes and the substance of socioeconomic transformation in late-twentieth-century Latin America.

Heidi Tinsman will discuss authoritarian Chile as an early example of a neoliberal nation-state, cautioning that “neoliberalism” should not be used as shorthand for “globalization” or “pro-trade” and “pro-capitalism” projects. For Tinsman, neoliberalism in Chile was associated with a very specific concept of the state and the role of markets in determining social services and mediating citizenship as well as the economy. Pablo Pryluka will draw from macroeconomic indicators and from his comparative research on consumer markets in Argentina, Brazil and Chile to discuss the concept of neoliberalism. James Woodard will question the supposed novelty of the “Washington Consensus” in the context of developmental advice emanating from the U.S. capital, while also commenting on the actual historical relations between economic liberalism, developmentalism, and consumerism in Brazil. Atman Mehta will argue that even from the perspective of capitalism’s core — especially the U.S. and Japan — the macroeconomic transformations experienced during the 1970s and 80s are ill-explained by “neoliberalism.” For Mehta, there was neither a mid-century Keynesian economy in the US or Japan, nor can subsequent macroeconomic transformations in those countries be explained by the ascendance of a political and economic right-wing.