similar multiple markers of participation and discernment of designated doctrines for the Neoliberal Thought Collective, from exclusive organizations like the MPS and certain designated think tanks, to denumerable membership lists to vade mecum texts covering keynote ideas and theories, to archival reflections of the principals, then a working characterization of neoliberalism is perfectly possible.
Quite a few perceptive historians of the NTC have worried that this Protean entity might be a little too variable to underwrite serious intellectual analysis.66 “There may therefore be a certain degree of truth in what might otherwise seem to be a sloppy and unprincipled claim, that neoliberalism has become omnipresent, but it is a complex, mediated and heterogeneous kind of omnipresence, not a state of blanket conformity. Neoliberalism has not simply diffused as a (self-) replicating system.”67 Granted, the ectoplasmic theory of mind control is usually a poor way to contemplate analysis of politics; yet the point remains that the neoliberal ground troops seem to be fully capable of recognizing kindred spirits, fostering intellectual interchange among allies, and more to the point, funding and organizing political movements with stable objectives and repetitive arguments even in the face of the global economic crisis. Here we point to bellwether phenomena to be addressed, from the demonization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to the neutralization of financial reform at both national and international levels, the promotion of class warfare against public employees by “populist” right-wing politicians to the total control over framing the problem of global warming, from the best-sellerdom of The Road to Serfdom to the astroturfing of the Tea Party, and, most notably, the pronounced shift of public attention from the culpability of banks and hedge funds to the predominant conviction that the crisis has been attributable to governmental fiscal irresponsibility. These suggest a degree of coherence and stability deriving from both continuity of intellectual tradition and persistence of community boundary work, the sum total of which is capable of supporting analytical generalizations about the movement.
Clearly, neoliberals do not navigate with a fixed static Utopia as the astrolabe for all their political strivings. They could not, since they don’t even agree on such basic terms as “market” and “freedom” in all respects, as we shall observe below. One can even agree with Brenner et al. and Naomi Klein that crisis is the preferred field of action for neoliberals, since that offers more latitude for introduction of bold experimental ‘reforms’ that only precipitate further crises down the road.68 Nevertheless, Neoliberalism does not dissolve into a gormless empiricism or random pragmatism. There persists a certain logic to the way it approaches crises; and that is directly relevant to comprehending its unexpected strength in the current global crisis.
Under that supposition, we endeavor here to provide a telegraphed and necessarily non-canonical characterization of the temporary configuration of doctrines that the thought collective had arrived at by roughly the 1980s. It transgresses disciplinary boundaries, in precisely the ways the neoliberals have done. Furthermore, the Thirteen Commandments below are chosen because they have direct bearing upon unfolding developments during the period of the crisis from 2007 onwards. To elide issues of who said what to whom, in and out of Mont Pèlerin, we provide the tenets in an abridged format of stark statements, without much individual elaboration or full documentation.69
[1] The starting point of neoliberalism is the admission, contrary to classical liberal doctrine, that their vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the conditions for its existence must be constructed, and will not come about “naturally” in the absence of concerted political effort and organization. As Foucault presciently observed in 1978 “Neoliberalism should not be confused with the slogan ‘laissez-faire,’ but on the contrary, should be regarded as a call to vigilance, to activism, to perpetual interventions.” The injunction to act in the face of inadequate epistemic warrant is the very soul of “constructivism,” an orientation sometimes shared with the field of science studies, and the very soul of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Classical liberalism, by contrast, disavowed this precept. As Sheldon Wolin once wrote, classical liberalism “conceived the issue as one of reconciling freedom and authority, and they solved it by destroying authority in the name of liberty and replacing it by society.” The neoliberals reject “society” as solution, and revive their version of authority in new guises. This becomes transmuted below into various arguments for the existence of a strong state as both producer and guarantor of a stable market society. As Peck puts it, “Neoliberalism was always concerned . . . with the challenge of first seizing and then retasking the state.” “What is ‘neo’ about Neoliberalism . . . [is] the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential.”70
[2] This assertion of a constructivist orientation raises the thorny issue of just what sort of ontological entity the neoliberal market is, or should be. What sort of “market” do neoliberals want to foster and protect? While one wing of the MPS (the Chicago School) has made its career by attempting to reconcile one version of neoclassical economic theory with neoliberal precepts, other subsets of the MPS have innovated entirely different characterizations of the market. The “radical subjectivist” wing of the Austrian School of economics attempted to ground the market in a dynamic process of discovery by entrepreneurs of what consumers did not yet even know that they wanted, due to the fact that the future is radically unknowable.71 Perhaps the dominant version at the MPS (and later, the dominant cultural doctrine) emanated from Hayek himself, wherein the “market” is posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentially patterned upon brain/computation metaphors.72 This version of the market is most intimately predicated upon modern epistemic doctrines, which in the interim have become the philosophical position most closely associated with the neoliberal Weltanschauung.
Here we find the first intimate point of connection with the narrative of the global crisis. From this perspective, prices in an efficient market “contain all relevant information” and therefore cannot be predicted by mere mortals. In this version, the market always surpasses the state’s ability to process information, and this constitutes the kernel of the argument for the necessary failure of socialism. All attempts to outguess the market, even in the midst of crisis free fall, must fail. But far from a purely negative doctrine, another related version of the efficient-markets hypothesis underwrote much of the theories and algorithms that were the framework of the baroque financial instruments and practices which resulted in the crisis in the first place.
Another partially rival approach to defining the market emanated from German ordoliberalism, which argues that competition in a well-functioning market needs to be directly organized by the state, by embedding it in various other social institutions.73 Hence, contrary to much that has been written on the beliefs of our protagonists, neoliberals do not speak with one voice on the key concept of the nature of the market. They most certainly do not uniformly subscribe to neoclassical economic theory, nor do they all pledge their troth to the cybernetic vision of the market in lockstep. (This reiterates the analytical separation broached in chapter 1.)
It may seem incredible, but historically, both the neoclassical tradition in economics and the NTC have been extremely vague when it comes to analytical specification of the exact structure and character of something they both refer to as the “market” Both seem overly preoccupied with what it purportedly does, while remaining cavalier about what it actually is. For the neoliberals, this allows the avoidance of a possible deep contradiction between their constructivist tendencies and their uninflected appeal to a monolithic market that has existed throughout all history and indifferently across the globe; for how can something be “made” when it is eternal and unchanging? This is solved by increasingly erasing any distinctions among the state, society, and the market, and simultaneously insisting their political project is aimed at reformation of society by subordinating it to the market.
[3] Even though there has not existed full consensus on just what sort of animal the market “really” is, the neoliberals
