This article seeks to untangle how the new vocabulary of the ‘social’ relates to the ‘American model’ of neoliberalization that was taken up by national elites across the West and many parts of the South in the 1980s and 1990s. It does so by focusing on one new field of policy (the social economy) in one jurisdiction (Québec) in order to uncover the different social economy projects being put forward, and to emphasize how these projects each had global linkages. In particular, the article will look at how the women’s movement, social democratic intellectuals and centres of power within the state each related to distinct bodies of global thinking on the social economy. This in turn translated into three distinct means of relating the social economy to neoliberalism, ranging from seeking to countervail it, through to attempts to flank it, to attempts to roll it out further.
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