Each political era has its own characteristic jargon, the words that embody the spirit of the times. In the heyday of neoliberalism, widespread optimism in “free markets,” was accompanied by a familiar jargon of “opportunity,” “meritocracy,” “entrepreneurialism,” and “openness.” These and similar terms would be frequently uttered by both center-right and center-left politicians, projecting an image of a better, freer future.

The commonality of terms was not just a linguistic quirk. It pointed to a solid bipartisan consensus, a set of shared assumptions about where society stood and where it was going. In the “new times,” the power of private initiative had to be unleashed, meddlesome state intervention should be limited, smooth market operations would take priority, and individuals’ right of choice had to come before any other consideration. Mainstream left and right positions accepted this supremacy of the market; their difference consisted in the diverging ways they proposed to manage it.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 emergency, this consensus is crumbling. Neoliberalism is caught in a crisis that is not merely political, but also epistemological: it can no longer explain reality. Much as in the 1970s Keynesian economists were short on solutions for stagflation, now neoliberal economists find their theories inadequate to an economic reality condition by the implosion of neoliberal globalization and the disruption of its supply chains.