Russian doll was fashioned as the special-purpose foundations for the education and promotion of neoliberal doctrines; in its early days, these included entities such as the Volker Fund, the Earhart Foundation, the Relm Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Foundation for Economic Education. These institutions were often set up as philanthropic or charitable units, if only to protect their tax status and seeming lack of bias.51 Some of these foundations were more than golden showers for the faithful, performing crucial organizational services as well: for instance, the Volker Fund kept a comprehensive “Directory” of affiliated neoliberal intellectuals, a list that had grown to 1,841 names by 1956.52 The next shell would consist of general-purpose “think tanks” (Institute for Economic Affairs, American Enterprise Institute, Schweizerisches Institut für Auslandforschung [Swiss Institute of International Studies], the Hoover Institution at Stanford) and satellite organizations such as the Federalist Society that sheltered neoliberals, who themselves might or might not also be members in good standing of various academic disciplines and universities. The think tanks then developed their own next layer of protective shell, often in the guise of specialized satellite think tanks poised to get quick and timely position papers out to friendly politicians, or to provide talking heads for various news media and opinion periodicals.53
To facilitate mass production in a transnational setting, neoliberals actually concocted a “mother of all think tanks” to seed their spawn across the globe. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher to assist other MPS-related groups in establishing neoliberal think tanks in their own geographic locations. It claims to have had a role in founding a third of all world “market oriented” think tanks, including (among others) the Fraser Institute (Canada), the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information (Venezuela), the Free Market Center (Belgrade), the Liberty Institute (Romania), and Unirule (Beijing).54 Atlas provided, among other services, one convenient conduit to launder contributions from such corporations as Philip Morris and Exxon to more specialized think tanks promoting their intellectual agenda. Later on, the thought collective began to consolidate a separate dedicated journalistic shell to more efficiently channel the output of inner layers of the Russian doll outward, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation,55 Bertelsmann AG, and a wide array of Internet blog and social networking sites.
When addressing their venture capital angels, the entrepreneurs of the Russian doll would admit that this interlocking set of institutions should be regarded as an integrated system for the production of political ideas. For instance, Richard Fink, one of the primary protagonists in building up George Mason University as a neoliberal outpost, by linking it directly to the Koch Foundation, of which he later became president, informed his prospective funders:
The translation of ideas into action requires the development of intellectual raw materials, their conversion into specific policy products, and the marketing and distribution of these products to citizen-consumers. Grant makers, Fink argued, would do well to invest in change along the entire production continuum, funding scholars and university programs where the intellectual framework for social transformation is developed, think tanks where scholarly ideas get translated into specific policy proposals, and implementation groups to bring these proposals into the political marketplace and eventually to consumers.56
Although the language dealt in terms of “markets” and “consumers,” the reality was a vertically integrated set of operations, whose outlines were apparent by the 1980s. The expansion of the think-tank shell proceeded apace with the expansion of the MPS presence, as revealed in Figure 2.1. One can appreciate the amount of groundwork that had preceded the “breakout” decade of the 1980s for the neoliberal project described by Fink from this and other indicators of the activities of the thought collective.
Figure 2.1: Growth of MPS-Affiliated Think Tanks
Source: Walpen, Die offen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft
Further outer shells have cladded and been augmented around the Russian doll as we get closer to the present—for instance, “astroturf” organizations consisting of supposedly local grass-roots members, frequently organized around religious or single-issue campaigns.57 Some aspects of the so-called Tea Party in the U.S. reveal how the practice of astroturfing has had direct impact upon reactions to the crisis. “FreedomWorks say they hope to turn the inchoate anger of the Tea Party into a focused pro-Hayek movement.”58 Fostering the appearance of spontaneous organization was often just as important for neoliberals as the actual political action that the astroturf organization was tasked to accomplish. Outsiders would rarely perceive the extent to which individual protagonists embedded in a particular shell served multiple roles, or the strength and pervasiveness of network ties, since they could never see beyond the immediate shell of the Russian doll right before their noses. This also tended to foster the impression of those “spontaneous orders” so beloved by the neoliberals, although they were frequently nothing of the sort. Moreover, the loose coupling defeated most attempts to paint the thought collective as a strict conspiracy. It was much beyond that, in the sense it was a thought collective in pursuit of a mass political movement; and in any event, it was built up through trial and error over time. It grew so successful, it soon became too large to qualify.
Figure 2.2: MPS Founding Meeting, 1947
The MPS edifice of neoliberalism was anchored by a variety of mainly European and American keystones, progressively encompassed a variety of economic, political, and social schools of thought, and maintained a floating transnational agora for debating solutions to perceived problems, a flexible canopy tailored with an eye to accommodating established relations of power in academia, politics, and society at large. It was never parochial, and was globally oriented before “globalization” became a buzzword. Max Thurn captured this aspect in his opening remarks to the 1964 Semmering MPS meeting:
Many of you have been to Austria before. There is little I can tell them about the country that they do not know already. Others have come for the first time. They may like to get a general idea of what this country was and what it is now before the meeting begins. What I can say on this subject has of course nothing to do with the topics of this programme. As members of the Mont Pèlerin Society we are not interested in the problems of individual nations or even groups of nations. What concerns us are general issues such as liberty and private initiative.59
This division of labor between the global thought collective and the parochial political action rapidly proved a transnational success; and by capping formal membership at five hundred, became another exclusive mark of distinction for famous right-wing aspirants. The global reach of its membership is displayed in the two maps of membership: at its inception, and then in 1991.
Figure 2.3: MPS Membership, 1991
The unusual structure of the thought collective helps explain why neoliberalism cannot be easily inscribed on a set of three-by-five cards, and needs to be understood as a pluralist entity (within certain limits) striving to distinguish itself from its three primary foes: laissez-faire classical liberalism, social-welfare liberalism, and socialism. Contrary to the dichotomies and rigidities that characterized classical liberalism with regard to its proposed firewalls between economics and politics, neoliberalism has to be understood as a flexible and pragmatic response to the previous crisis of capitalism (viz., the Great Depression) with a clear vision of what needed to be opposed by all means: a planned economy and a vibrant welfare state. Contrary to some narrow interests of some corporate captains (including some in the MPS), neoliberal intellectuals understood this general goal to imply a comprehensive long-term reform effort to retat the entire fabric of society,
