The “chilean experiment.” the economic reforms and the conceptual emergence of neoliberalism in Pinochet's dictatorship, 1975-1983

At the beginning of the 1980s, the concept “neoliberalism” was rarely used. In the following decades, however, it became an indispensable category to characterize the economic liberalization and privatization programs implemented in different parts of the world. In this article we propose that the origin of the resemantization and diffusion of the concept “neoliberalism” lay in the experience of the economic reforms applied in Chile by the “Chicago Boys” during Augusto Pinochet's regime. Based on the works by Conservative, Social Christian and Socialist intellectuals and research centers, we propose that between 1981 and 1982 the category “neoliberalism” was used for the first time to describe and criticize the re-founding project of the dictatorship, precisely when that said model was entering a deep crisis. The relevance of this concept as the articulating axis of a heterogeneous political and intellectual opposition is explained by the very effects of the dictatorship's economic reforms. The closure and contraction of the State as part of the demands for radical economic liberalization imposed by the “Chicago Boys” produced important disaffections that ended up breaking the counterrevolutionary social alliance that initially supported the regime. It is not by chance, then, that the use of the concept “neoliberalism” to criticize the dictatorship's model had gathered Conservative, Social Christians and “renewed” Socialist thinkers.