of society, which they conceive to be in pursuit of their very curious icon of pure freedom. I agree with Wendy Brown that neoliberalism became a “constructivist” project, no matter how much it was a term against which Hayek often railed.36 That neoliberalism turned out to be very nearly the polar opposite of libertarian anarchism is something that has taken a long while to sink in, but is now becoming widely accepted in circles concerned with political economy.37 That is why “neoliberalism” is not only a historically accurate designation of a specific strain of political thought, but it is descriptively acute as well: most of the early neoliberals explicitly distanced themselves from what they considered the outmoded classical liberal doctrine of laissez-faire.38 They sought to offer something newer, and less passive. Later members like James Buchanan were even more frank regarding the neoliberal attraction to the state, at least when addressing the closed meetings of the MPS:
Among our members, there are some who are able to imagine a viable society without a state . . . For most of our members, however, social order without a state is not readily imagined, at least in any normatively preferred sense . . . Of necessity, we must look at our relations with the state from several windows, to use the familiar Nietzschean metaphor . . . Man is, and must remain, a slave to the state. But it is critically and vitally important to recognize that ten per cent slavery is different from fifty per cent slavery.39
Similar sentiments were expressed at other comparable conclaves. For instance, John MacCallum Scott proposed to the 1956 meetings of the Liberal International, “Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed”; the British economist Arthur Shenfield pronounced in a speech to the 1954 MPS conference, “It does no service either to liberalism or to democracy to assume that democracy is necessarily liberal or liberalism is necessarily democratic.”40 Thenceforth, for neoliberals, “freedom” would have to change its connotations.
Thus there are at least two imposing obstacles confronting anyone seeking a deeper understanding of neoliberalism: the fog thrown up around the term “neoliberalism” and attendant doctrines by the participants themselves, in pursuit of their own political unification ambitions and projects with other movements on the right; and the fact that the tenets of neoliberal doctrine evolved and mutated over the postwar period.41 The ten-plus commandments of neoliberalism were not delivered complete and immaculate down from the Mont in 1947, when the neoliberals convened their first meeting of the MPS. Nor can one reliably reconstruct it from a small set of “Hayekian encyclicals,” as Jamie Peck so aptly puts it. In fact, if we simply restrict ourselves to Mont Pèlerin itself (and this is unduly narrow), there rapidly precipitated at least three distinguishable sects or subguilds: the Austrian-inflected Hayekian legal theory, the Chicago School of neoclassical economics, and the German Ordoliberals.42 Hayek himself admitted this in the mid-1980s, when he warned of “the constant danger that the Mont Pèlerin Society might split into a Friedmanite and Hayekian wing.”43 An impartial spectator could observe ongoing tensions between them, but also signs that they eventually cross-fertilized each other. It takes a rather bulky Baedeker to keep it straight; another thing that surely wards off the merely curious outsider.
It is reasonable to wonder what could have held neoliberalism together under the centrifugal forces threatening to fragment it into factionalism. David Harvey propounds the Marxist position that it is straightforwardly a class project masked by various versions of “free market” rhetoric. For him, the ideas are far less significant than the brute function of serving the interests of finance capital and globalized elites in the redistribution of wealth upward. Michael Howard and James King proffer what they term an historical materialist reading, fairly similar to Harvey, one that “stresses the importance of the contradictions inherent in the institutions prevalent in the postwar era, and the crises these contradictions spawned in the 1970s.”44 Daniel Stedman Jones divides neoliberalism into three phases characterized by dominant political practices: the prehistory up to the first meeting of Mont Pèlerin, a second phase up to the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher consisting of a monetarist critique of neo-Keynesianism, and a modern phase since the 1980s.45 Jamie Peck gives greater weight to ideas, suggesting that the fragmentation is real, but still offset by a shared commitment to an unattainable utopian notion of freedom. Nevertheless, he credits success in infiltrating the state as permitting wide latitude in divergent component theories: “Only with the capture of state power could immanent critique become rolling autocritique.”46 Peter-Wim Zuidhof suggests that the fragmentation is part of a conscious program of rhetoric to empty out any fixed referent for the term “market.”47 Without denying the force of any of these explanations, there are also a few rather more pedestrian considerations of the actual structure of the MPS and its attendant satellite organizations.
I would suggest that the Mont Pèlerin Society evolved into an exceptionally successful structure for the incubation of integrated political theory and political action outside of the more conventional structures of academic disciplines and political parties in the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps, one day, it will come to be studied as something new in the sociology of knowledge in the twentieth century. It was a novel framework that served to confine any tendencies to intellectual dissolution, holding the three subguilds in productive tension. Hayek in 1946 initially promoted a vision of the MPS as “something halfway between a scholarly association and a political society,”48 but it evolved into something much more than that. The main reason the MPS should serve as our talisman in tracking neoliberalism is because it exists as part of a rather special structure of intellectual discourse, perhaps unprecedented in the 1940s, one I would venture to propose to think of as a “Russian doll” approach to the integration of research and praxis in the modern world. The project was to produce a functional hierarchical elite of regimented political intellectuals; as Hayek wrote to Bertrand de Jouvenel, “I sometimes wonder whether it is not more than capitalism this strong egalitarian strain (they call it democracy) in America which is so inimical to the growth of a cultural elite.”49 Neoliberals found that Mont Pèlerin was an effective instrument to reconstruct their hierarchy, untethered to local circumstances. Henceforth, I will use the term “thought collective” to refer to this multilevel, multiphase, multisector approach to the building of political capacity to incubate, critique, and promulgate ideas.
The Neoliberal Thought Collective was structured very differently from the other “invisible colleges” that sought to change people’s minds in the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike most intellectuals in the 1950s, the early protagonists of the MPS did not look to the universities or the academic “professions” or to interest-group mobilizations as the appropriate primary instruments to achieve their goals. Those entities were held too in thrall to the state, from the neoliberal perspective. The early neoliberals felt, at that juncture with some justification, that they were excluded from most high-profile intellectual venues in the West. Hence the MPS was constituted as a closed, private members-only debating society whose participants were hand-picked (originally primarily by Hayek, but later through a closed nomination procedure) and which consciously sought to remain out of the public eye. The purpose was to create a special space where people of like-minded political ideals could gather together to debate the outlines of a future movement diverging from classical liberalism, without having to suffer the indignities of ridicule for their often blue-sky proposals, but also to evade the fifth-column reputation of a society closely aligned with powerful but dubious postwar interests. Even the name of the society was itself chosen to be relatively anodyne, signaling little in the way of substantive content to outsiders.50 Many members would indeed hold academic posts in a range of academic disciplines, but this was not a precondition of MPS membership. The MPS could thus also be expanded to encompass various powerful capitalists, and not just intellectuals.
One then might regard specific academic departments where the neoliberals came to dominate before 1980 (University of Chicago Economics, the LSE, L’Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales at Geneva, Chicago Law School, St. Andrews in Scotland, Freiburg, the Virginia School, George Mason University) as the next outer layer of the Russian doll, one emergent public face of the thought collective—although one rarely publicly
