who created it in the first place, since they clearly embodied the best understanding of the shape of the crisis. The revolving door between the U.S. Treasury and Goldman Sachs was evidence that the market system worked, and not of ingrained corruption and conflicts of interest.
[12] The neoliberal program ends up vastly expanding incarceration and the carceral sphere in the name of getting the government off our backs. Members of the Mont Pèlerin Society were fond of Benjamin Constant’s adage: “The government, beyond its proper sphere ought not to have any power; within its sphere, it cannot have enough of it.” Although this might seem specious from the perspective of a libertarian, it is central to understanding the fact that neoliberal policies lead to unchecked expansion of the penal sector, as has happened in the United States. As Bernard Harcourt has explained in detail, however much tenet 11 might seem to suggest that crime be treated as just another market process, the NTC has moved from the treatment of crime as exogenously defined within a society by its historical evolution, to a definition of crime as inefficient attempts to circumvent the market. The implication is that intensified state power in the police sphere (and a huge expansion of prisoners incarcerated) is fully complementary with the neoliberal conception of freedom. In the opinion of the MPS member Richard Posner, “The function of criminal sanction in a capitalist market economy, then, is to prevent individuals from bypassing the efficient market.”109
This precept has some bearing on the unwillingness to pursue criminal prosecution against many of the major players in the global crisis. In this neoliberal perspective, there is also a natural stratification in what classes of law are applicable to different scofflaws: “the criminal law is designed primarily for the nonaffluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”110 In other words, economic competition imposes natural order on the rich, because they have so much to lose. The poor need to be kept in line by a strong state, because they have so little to lose. Hence, the spectacle of (as yet) no major financial figure outside of Bernie Madoff and Raj Rajnarathan going to jail because of the crisis, while thousands of families behind on their mortgages are turfed out into the street by the constabulary, is a direct consequence of this neoliberal precept.
[13] The neoliberals have struggled from the outset to have their political/economic theories do dual service as a moral code. First and foremost, it would appear that the thought collective worshipped at the altar of a deity without restraints: “individual freedom, which it is most appropriate to regard as a moral principle of political action. Like all moral principles, it demands that it be accepted as a value in itself.” However, Hayek in his original address to the first MPS meeting said, “I am convinced that unless the breach between true liberal and religious convictions can be healed, there is no hope for a revival of liberal forces.” The very first MPS meeting reflected that wish, and held a session called “Liberalism and Christianity”; but it revealed only the antagonisms that percolated just below the surface. As a consequence, the neoliberals were often tone-deaf when it came to the transcendental, conflating it with their epistemic doctrines concerning human frailty: “we must preserve that indispensable matrix of the uncontrolled and non-rational which is the only environment wherein reason can grow and operate effectively.”111
The more sophisticated neoliberals understood this was rather thin gruel for many of their allies on the right; so from time to time, they sought to link neoliberalism to a specific religion, although they only ventured to do this sotto voce in their in-house publications:
All that we can say is that the values we hold are the product of freedom, that in particular the Christian values had to assert themselves through men who successfully resisted coercion by government, and that it is to the desire to be able to follow one’s own moral convictions that we owe the modern safeguards of individual freedom. Perhaps we can add to this that only societies which hold moral values essentially similar to our own have survived as free societies, while in others freedom has perished.112
Other MPS figures such as Buchanan entertained the notion that a certain specific type of moral order would support a neoliberal state, or that morals could reduce the costs of rent-seeking losers throwing monkey wrenches into government.113 It took a lot of effort, and a fair bit of pussyfooting around the danger of alienating the partisans of one denomination (often in some other part of the world) by coquetting with different denominations or versions of religion, but the project of intellectual accommodation with the religious right and the theocons within the neoliberal framework has been an ongoing project at the MPS, although one fraught with contradictions that have dogged the liberal project since the Enlightenment.114
These thirteen more or less echt-commandments gathered here characterize the rough shape of the program eventually arrived at by the Neoliberal Thought Collective. In this summary, I have sought to highlight the stark divergence from both classical liberalism and libertarianism; further, the individual tenets will also serve as touchstones for our account of the intellectual history of the global economic crisis in subsequent chapters. Yet, having strained to discern unity in what sometimes appears a free-for-all, we should now confront the contrary proposition—that neoliberalism, in some fundamental conceptual sense, does not hang together in actual practice.
Neoliberalism, the Crisis, and the Double Truth Doctrine
All political movements of whatever stripe frequently find themselves in the position of needing to deny something they have affirmed in the past. If politics were the realm of consistency, and consistency the bugaboo of small minds, then zealots would indeed inherit the earth. Acknowledging that, there seems to be nonetheless something a little unusual going on in the Neoliberal Thought Collective, and I think it can be understood, if not entirely justified, by recourse to the doctrine of “double truth.”
Just to be clear about the nature of what will be asserted, I am not referring here to the Platonic doctrine of the “noble lie,” nor the Latin Averroist precepts concerning the tensions between philosophic reason and faith. Neither is it the “doublethink” of Orewellian provenance, which has more to do with the state twisting the meaning of words. It may have some relationship to the thought of Leo Strauss—the hermeneutic awareness that “all philosophers . . . must take into account the political situation of philosophy, that is, what can be said and what must be kept under wraps,” as the Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss puts it—but exploring the possible Chicago connections between his writings and the neoliberals would be too much of a distraction, given all the other topics we must cover.115 What I shall refer to here is the proposition that an intellectual thought collective might actually concede that, as a corollary of its developed understanding of politics, it would be necessary to maintain an exoteric version of its doctrine for the masses—because that would be safer for the world and more beneficial for ordinary society—but simultaneously hold fast to an esoteric doctrine for a small closed elite, envisioned as the keepers of the flame of the collective’s wisdom. Furthermore, whereas both the exoteric and esoteric versions would deal with many similar themes and issues, the exoteric version might appear on its face to contradict the esoteric version in various particulars. It will be necessary to explore the possibility that these seeming contradictions are not cynical in the modality one often encounters in career politicians, but rather grow organically out of the structural positions that motivate the thought collective.
I don’t think it has gone unnoticed that the NTC embodies a budget of paradoxes, to put it politely. It starts with the strange behavior we already encountered: the neoliberals had begun acknowledging in the 1930s–’50s that they were in pursuit of something “neo,” only to subsequently deny all divergence from an ancient time-honored “liberalism,” against all evidence to the contrary. Subsequently, the continuity story became the exoteric stance, whereas the “neo” remained an esoteric appreciation. But then the dichotomy expands into all manner of seemingly incompatible positions. As Will Davies has put it: market competition should stand as a guarantor of democracy, but not vice versa; unimpeded economic activity would guarantee political freedom, but not vice versa. Yet, curiously, this did not apply
