the top, and they know it. The Richard Finks, Leonard Reads, and Antony Fishers of the world are the true movers and shakers of the neoliberal movement, not some blogger in a basement. Salarymen are the purest expression of taxis, but must not say so.
In my opinion, the most perceptive and honest attempt to address the straddle between spontaneous order and calculated politics was the legacy of a rather less-cited MPS member (although another winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize), George Stigler. The oral tradition at Chicago had long acknowledged that Stigler’s approach to the ultimate purpose of economics was different from that of the others:
MILTON FRIEDMAN: There’s no problem [between their respective approaches]. It’s true, that George wanted to change things.
AARON DIRECTOR: But he preferred to study them, not to change them.
MF: He preferred to say that he preferred to study them . . . It was partly a long-running difference between him and me . . . And he liked to stress, “I just want to understand the world and Milton wants to change it.”135
Stigler’s self-denying ordinance was not, however, the conventional instance of the reticence and humility of the temperate scholar. He was directly responding to the contradiction lodged in the NTC identified in this section. Stigler understood that the Audacity of Intervention was a consequence of an asymmetry in the neoliberal theory of politics:
As I mentally review Milton’s work, I recall no important occasion on which he has told businessmen how to behave. . . . Yet Milton has shown no comparable reticence in advising Congress and the public on monetary policy, tariffs, schooling, minimum wages, the tax benefits of establishing a ménage without benefit of clergy, and several other subjects. . . . Why should businessmen—and customers and lenders and other economic agents—know and foster their own interests, but voters and political coalitions be so much in need of his and our lucid and enlightened instruction?136
Stigler was a true believer in the marketplace of ideas, a neoliberal notion if ever there was one. The public buys the information it wants, and adopts political positions based upon optimal ignorance.137 For Stigler, there was no necessary historical trend or telos toward the neoliberal market. In his books, Friedman’s (and Buchanan’s) quest to educate and edify the unwashed was a miserable waste of time and resources, if one were to believe the neoliberal characterization of the market, and of politics as a market phenomenon. But then, what was the putative function of the Neoliberal Thought Collective? Stigler’s answer was profound: it was to capture the minds of the crucial elites by innovating new economic and political doctrines that those elites would recognize as being in their interest once they were introduced to them (presumably by the outer shells of the neoliberal Russian doll). The MPS was that most noble protagonist, an intellectual entrepreneur; it came up with products before the clientele even knew they wanted them; and what it sold were the tools for those poised to infiltrate the government and immunize policy from the optimally stupid electorate. Technocratic elites could intently maintain the fiction that “the people” had their say, while reconfiguring government functions in a neoliberal direction. These elite saboteurs would bring about the neoliberal market society far more completely and efficaciously than waiting for the fickle public to come around to their beliefs.138 Friedman and Buchanan had sailed too close to the wind in not holding democracy in sufficient contempt; what the neoliberal program counseled was a coup, not a New England town-hall meeting. Stigler did want to change the world, but in a manner more Machiavellian than his peers.139 His was the instruction manual for neoliberals to occupy government, not merely disparage it.
I think that Stigler’s construction of the meaning and purpose of the Neoliberal Thought Collective was the version that won out after the 1980s, in part because it openly embraced the double-truth doctrine, rather than uneasily squirming around it, as Friedman had done. The MPS offered its elite recruits one thing, and the outer shells of the Russian doll another. The exoteric knowledge of the spontaneous order of the market was good enough for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal; the esoteric doctrine of reengineering government to recast society comprised the marching orders of the NTC. Friedman was the public face, Stigler the clan fixer. For the former, the MPS was just another debating society; for the latter, it was the executive committee of the capitalist insurgency.
3. The MPS as a Society of Rationalists promoting ignorance as a virtue.
Many observers have seen fit to comment that the MPS was not a very open society, in the Popperian sense, and that its regimented character may have appeared a bit incongruous given its professed beliefs; but in my opinion, most analysts have fallen down when it comes to this third straddle140. That is a shame, because it will transpire that this particular “double truth” is far and away the most important of the three for understanding how the NTC managed to come through the crisis relatively unscathed.
Hayek is noteworthy in that he placed ignorance at the very center of his political theory: “the case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of us all.”141 Most commentators tend to interpret this as an appeal to ignorance as some kind of primal state of mankind; but I think they need to expand their horizons. The distinction begins to bite when we take note that Hayek harbored a relatively low opinion of the role of education and discussion in the process of learning, and notoriously, an even lower opinion of the powers of ratiocination of those he disparaged as “the intellectuals.” These, of course, were the mirror image of his belief in the market as a superior information processor:
Nor is the process of forming majority opinion entirely, or even chiefly, a matter of discussion, as the overintellectualized conception would have it . . . Though discussion is essential, it is not the main process by which people learn. Their views and desires are formed by individuals acting according to their own designs . . . It is because we normally do not know who knows best that we leave the decision to a process we do not control.142
For Hayek and other advocates of “emergent” social cognition, true rational thought is impersonal, but can occur only between and beyond the individual agents who putatively do the thinking. As he wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, “to act rationally we often find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection.” As Christian Arnsperger so aptly put it, for Hayek, “rational judgment can only be uttered by a Great Nobody.”143 That may seem odd in someone superficially tagged as a methodological individualist supporter of freedom; but it just goes to show how far ignorance has become ingrained in American political discourse. The trick lies in comprehending how Hayek could harbor such a jaundiced view of the average individual, while simultaneously elevating “knowledge” to pride of place in the economic pantheon:
Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority.144
For Hayek, “Knowledge is perhaps the chief good that can be had at a price,” but difficult to engross and accumulate, because it “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” You might think this would easily be handled by delegating its collection and winnowing to some middlemen, say to academic experts, but you would be mistaken, according to Hayek. He takes the position that all human personal abilities to evaluate the commodity are weak, at best. And this is not a matter of differential capacities or distributions of innate intelligence: “the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.” Experts are roundly disparaged by Hayek, and accused of essentially serving as little more than apologists for whomever employs them.145 On the face of it, it thus
