was not merely that of passive apologists. Neoliberals aimed to develop a thoroughgoing reeducation effort for all parties to alter the tenor and meaning of political life: nothing more, nothing less.60 Neoliberal intellectuals identified their immediate targets as elite civil society. Their efforts were primarily aimed at winning over intellectuals and opinion leaders of future generations, and their primary instrument was redefining the place of knowledge in society, which also became the central theme in their theoretical tradition. As Hayek said in his address to the first meeting of the MPS:
But what to the politicians are fixed limits of practicability imposed by public opinion must not be similar limits to us. Public opinion on these matters is the work of men like ourselves . . . who have created the political climate in which the politicians of our time must move . . . I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.61
The Russian doll structure of the Neoliberal Thought Collective would tend to amplify and distribute the voice of any one member throughout a series of seemingly different organizations, personas, and broadcast settings, lending it resonance and gravitas, not to mention fronting an echo chamber for ideas right at the time when hearing them was most propitious. Not without admiration, we have to concede that neoliberal intellectuals struggled through to a deeper understanding of the political and organizational character of modern knowledge and science than did their opponents on the left, and therefore present a worthy contemporary challenge to everyone interested in the archaeology of knowledge.
Of course, neoliberalism should not then or now be reduced to the MPS and the roster of related think tanks—that would be a travesty of the history.62 My stress on the MPS and the Russian doll serves to counter the tendency on the left to regard neoliberalism as a hopelessly diffuse and ill-defined movement. In subsequent chapters we will explore how neoliberal ideas have become rooted in the economics profession, as well as in many facets of everyday life, which of course extends outside the narrow circumference of MPS activities. And then there are the consequences of transformation of political parties on the right and left, which tend to occupy much more attention in the existing literature. Nevertheless, at least until the 1980s—when the advance of neoliberal ideas, and thus the success of the original neoliberal networks, led to a rapid multiplication of pretenders to the title of progenitors of neoliberalism—the MPS network can be safely used as cipher to decode with sufficient precision the neoliberal thought style in the era of its genesis.
Of course, such considerations do not have the same salience once we get to the current economic crisis. While the detailed research is yet to be conducted, outsider perceptions of the modern MPS suggest that it no longer serves as the cornucopia of blue sky thinking and rigorous debate which then gets conveyed to the outer shells of the Russian doll in the ways that it did during the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the problem seems to have been that, as neoliberals savored political success, membership in the core MPS came to be just another “positional good” especially prized by the idle rich with intellectual pretensions. As the composition of the membership skewed in the direction of the sort of persons more often found at Davos or the Bohemian Grove, the actual role of the core as a high-powered debating society has tended to ossify. That function, it seems, tended to migrate to outer layers of the Russian doll, such as certain key university centers and the larger established think tanks. When the crisis hit, the first tendency was to attempt a reversion to the older model of a Grand Conclave of the Faithful; but as we observed in chapter 1, the best that was mustered was a reiteration of doctrines developed a half-century previously. However, in chapter 6, we moot the possibility that the outer shells themselves have developed a generic full-spectrum pattern of political response to dire crises. If true, it means that neoliberalism has become more coherent in the face of the crisis, not more diffuse, as some authors maintain.
A Short Course in Neoliberal Economic Doctrine
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the neoliberal project stood out from other strains of right-wing thought in that it self-consciously was constituted as a multitiered sociological entity dedicated to the continued transnational development, promulgation, and popularization of doctrines intended to mutate over time, in reaction to both intellectual criticism and external events. It was a movable feast, and not a catechism fixed at the Council of Trent.63 Much of the time the litmus test was shared political objectives inculcated through prolonged internship in the thought collective; but infrequently, even that was open to delicate negotiation. Nevertheless, it was a sociological thought collective that eventually produced a relatively shared ontology concerning the world coupled with a more-or-less shared set of propositions about markets and political economy. These propositions are, of necessity, a central focus of a book on the relationship of neoliberals to the crisis. It should be very important to have some familiarity with these ideas, if only to resist simple-minded characterizations of the neoliberal approach to the crisis as some evangelical “market fundamentalism.”
Although it is undeniably the case that all manner of secondhand purveyors of ideas on the right would wish to crow that “market freedom” promotes their own brand of religious righteousness, or maybe even the converse, it nonetheless debases comprehension to conflate the two by disparaging both as “fundamentalism”—a sneer unfortunately becoming commonplace on the left. It seems very neat and tidy to assert that neoliberals operate in a modus operandi on a par with religious fundamentalists: just slam The Road to Serfdom (or if you are really Low-to-No Church, Atlas Shrugged) on the table along with the King James Bible, and then profess to have unmediated personal access to the original true meaning of the only (two) book(s) you’ll ever need to read in your lifetime. Counterpoising morally confused evangelicals with the reality-based community may seem tempting to some; but it dulls serious thought. It may sometimes feel that a certain market-inflected personalized version of Salvation has become more prevalent in Western societies, but that turns out to be very far removed from the actual content of the neoliberal program.
Neoliberalism does not impart a dose of that Old Time Religion. Not only is there no ur-text of neoliberalism; the neoliberals have not themselves opted to retreat into obscurantism, however much it may seem that some of their fellow travelers may have done so. You won’t often catch them wondering, “What Would Hayek Do?” Instead they developed an intricately linked set of overlapping propositions over time—for example, from Ludwig Erhard’s “social market economy” to Herbert Giersch’s cosmopolitan individualism, from Milton Friedman’s “monetarism” to the rational-expectations hypothesis, from Hayek’s “spontaneous order” to James Buchanan’s constitutional order, from Gary Becker’s “human capital” to Steven Levitt’s “freakonomics,” from Heartland’s climate denialism to AEI’s geoengineering project, and, most appositely, from Hayek’s “socialist calculation controversy” to Chicago’s efficient-markets hypothesis. Along the way they have lightly sloughed off many prior classical liberal doctrines—for instance, opposition to corporate monopoly power as politically debilitating, or skepticism over strong intellectual property, or disparaging finance as an intrinsic source of macroeconomic disturbance—without coming clean on their reversals.64
Acknowledgment of neoliberalism as a living, mutating entity makes it hard for people who are not historians to wrap their arms around the phenomenon, and prompts those seeking a three-by-five-card definition to throw up their hands in defeat. Disbelievers and skeptics often scoff when they hear about the mutable character of neoliberal doctrine, but I think they ought to pay a little attention to science studies, which seems quite comfortable tracking functional identity-within-change by combining institutional data with a rotating yet finite roster of protagonists, with an old-fashioned history of ideas. For instance, what did it mean to be “doing quantum physics” in the 1960s and ’70s? It wasn’t just big teams working on solid-state devices plus a few geniuses in pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory. It even extended to hippie communes and New Age consciousness. Or, in another case, the pursuit of cosmological theories has a colorful coherent history, even though it repeatedly transgressed the boundaries of existing sciences, and sometimes had trouble deciding if the object of its
