Esoteric knowledge was transgressive: a liberalism for the twenty-first century could be incubated and sustained only by an irredeemably illiberal organization. Part of the price of admission was initiation into the double truth of the “minimum philosophy”: insiders could learn to live with this esoteric doctrine after a long period of apprenticeship. Outsiders need never know anything about it, and could persist snug in their belief that liberalism meant the tolerant dialogue of the open society; of course, they need never apply to actually enter the MPS.
2. The MPS as regimented controlled society dedicated to the doctrine of “spontaneous order.”
As in the previous case, the internal MPS membership themselves were first to comment on the incongruity of this situation. As the house historian of the MPS reports, Milton Friedman joked in a letter to Hayek, “Our faith requires that we are skeptical of the efficacy, at least in the short run, of organized efforts to promulgate [MPS doctrines].”125 The problem, quite clearly, was if the neoliberal portrait of market order was so overwhelmingly superior, then why hadn’t it just naturally come to dominate all other economic forms? Why hadn’t it already summoned the spirit of liberalism that would guarantee it to flourish? Who really needed the shock troops of the Neoliberal Thought Collective? Classical liberals had adopted the consistent position either that it already had or would happen inexorably, so just sit back and enjoy the inexorable trend of history. Neoliberals had rejected all that in favor of an activist stance, but then had to face up to the vexatious intellectual lack of consilience between their sneers at the impudence of the will to planning and their own presumption of the utter nobility of their own will to power. In other words, how could they justify the Audacity of Intervention, or as James Buchanan so cagily posed the question by misrepresenting their own program as classically liberal:
The classical liberal, in the role of social engineer, may, of course, recommend institutional laissez faire as a preferred policy stance. But why, and under what conditions, should members of the citizenry, or of some ultimate political decision authority, accept this advice more readily than that proffered by any other social engineer?126
As we have now grown accustomed, there existed more than one engagement with this conundrum within the Neoliberal Thought Collective; however, this fact should be understood as intimately entwined with the double-truth doctrine. Although I expect further research will uncover further variants, I will briefly point to three responses within the MPS.
The first response was that pioneered by Milton Friedman, and, it so happens, James Buchanan. The story here went that modern government was an aberration in the history of civilization, one that continually sought to leverage its massive power into engrossment of even more power, growing like a cancer on the otherwise healthy body of market society. Friedman in particular took the position that if he could explain this in simple and compelling ways to the public, in short sentences and punchy proposals and catchy slogans, they would respond favorably to his image of natural order, and voluntarily accept the political prescriptions offered them by the NTC.127 All that was required to offset the wayward course of history was some media coverage of a plucky little David standing up to the governmental Goliath. Friedman was the master of the faux-sympathetic stance, “I just want what you want; but the government never gives it to us. I can.”128 He remained faithful to this prescription to a fault, expending prodigious efforts on popular books, a television series, his Newsweek column, and his indefatigable willingness to debate the most diversified opponents on stages all over the world. He even bequeathed his fortune to fund the effort to undermine state-sponsored primary education, since that was where the state had brainwashed the largest number of tender minds. Of course, this notion of expert tutelage constituted the most superficial response that would have occurred to any postwar American economist of whatever stripe, given the presumptive role of the expert during the Cold War era.129 In that frame, the people were a featureless lump of clay to be molded by the charismatic expert. Friedman did in fact become the public face of the NTC in America from the 1960s to the 1990s; but his position was pitched too far into Pollyanna territory, and gave too many hostages to “democracy,” to suit the tougher-minded souls in the MPS.
The second, richer and more complex answer was proffered by Hayek. He did strive to maintain that there was a natural telos driving history in the neoliberal direction (although this surfaced only late in his career), but the obstacle to its realization was the treason of the intellectuals. He notoriously dismissed these “second-hand dealers in ideas,” and convened Mont Pèlerin as a countermovement to neutralize them politically in the longer run. This hostility was shared by many other members of the MPS, from Bertrand de Jouvenel to Raymond Aron. However, this set up a dynamic where Hayek eventually felt he had to distinguish between legitimate and fake organizations, or what he called “kosmos” versus “taxis.” The taxis, or constructed order, was usually “simple” and intentionally set up to serve a preconceived set of purposes. The kosmos, or spontaneous order, grew up organically without intended purpose, although it would persist due to the fact that it performed certain unforeseen functions in a superior manner. Participants didn’t need to know or understand the rules of a kosmos to go with the flow, but generally had to be compelled to follow the rules of a taxis. In his usual subtle manner, after defining it, Hayek invested the notion of taxis with negative connotations, and then equated it with institutions of formal government; whereas the kosmos came endowed with all manner of positive connotations, only to imperceptibly turn into his own neoliberal conception of the market.130
All this taxonomizing was fine; but the question that was motivating Hayek, even if he never adequately addressed it directly, was: What sort of “order” was the MPS, and what sort of order was the Neoliberal Thought Collective dedicated to bringing about?131 The provisional answer began by blurring the boundaries of the sharp distinction he had just wrought: “while the rules on which a spontaneous order rests may also be of spontaneous origin, this need not always be the case . . . it is possible that an order which would still have to be described as spontaneous rests on rules which were entirely the result of deliberate design . . . collaboration will always rest both on spontaneous order as well as deliberate organization.”132 Here he elided acknowledgment that the MPS and the larger NTC did not themselves qualify as a spontaneous order, if only because it was predicated upon stipulated rules that were not the same for all members; nor were they independent of any common purpose. When you unpacked all the shells of the Russian doll, it was just another elaborate hierarchical political movement.
But perhaps this might be mitigated in the instance it could be regarded as a mongrel amalgam of taxis and kosmos. Certainly, intentional stipulation could potentially have unintended consequences, which meant that almost any phenomenon was a mare’s nest of both kosmos and taxis elements; but Hayek decided he could not condone such promiscuity:
[I]t is impossible, not only to replace spontaneous orders by organization and at the same time to utilize as much of the dispersed knowledge of all its members as possible, but also to improve or correct this order by interfering in it by direct commands. Such a combination of spontaneous order and organization it can never be rational to adopt.133
Since Hayek’s original point had been that no one “rationally” adopts a kosmos, here was where his construct broke down. Either the dividing line between kosmos and taxis was bright and clear, and the MPS was an example of a taxis, which was thus illegitimate by his own lights, or else kosmos and taxis were hopelessly intertwined, but then there was no dependable way in his system to separate “government” from “market,” and the politics of the NTC would threaten to become unintelligible. The Hayekian wing of the thought collective has never been able to square this circle, so it has to resort to double-truth tactics. For outsiders, neoliberal thinkers are portrayed as plucky individual rebel blooms of rage against the machine, arrayed against all the forces of big government and special interests, and in a few hyperbolic instances, even against the “capitalists.”134 They are neither sown nor cultivated, but are like unto dandelions after a spring rain, pure expressions of the kosmos. But once initiated into the
