Neoliberal Thought Collective tamed many of the contending contradictory conceptions of the “good society” documented in this volume by trying to have it both ways: to stridently warn of the perils of expanding purview of state activity while simultaneously imagining the strong state of their liking rendered harmless through some instrumentality of “natural” regulation; to posit their “free market” as an effortless generator and conveyor belt of information while simultaneously strenuously and ruthlessly prosecuting a “war of ideas” on the ground; asserting that their program would lead to unfettered economic growth and enhanced human welfare while simultaneously suggesting that no human mind could ever really know any such thing, and therefore that it was illegitimate to justify their program by its consequences; to portray the market as something natural, yet simultaneously in need of solicitous attention to continually reconstruct it; to portray their version of the market as the ne plus ultra of all human institutions, while simultaneously suggesting that the market is in itself insufficient to attain and nourish transeconomic values of a political, social, religious, and cultural character. “Neoliberal writings on allocation shift back and forth between libertarian and utilitarian vocabularies, with the two sometimes appearing interchangeably within a paper or chapter.”117 This ability to vertiginously pivot between paragraphs should itself be considered a political technology of the NTC.
The proliferation of straddles cannot be chalked up to mere pluralism of voices, inadequate critical attention, or absentmindedness. Few political doctrines have undergone the sustained extent of internal criticism of neoliberalism at Mont Pèlerin. All systems sport a modicum of internal contradictions as they age; but these particular discordances appear to betoken some structural problems within the neoliberal program, which have been dealt with in the recent past through application of the double-truth principle. I opt to cover three such contradictions here, which are arguably central to an understanding of the crisis: (1) that a society dedicated to liberal ideals had to resort to illiberal procedures and practices; (2) that a society that held spontaneous order as the ne plus ultra of human civilization had to submit to heavy regimentation and control; and (3) that a society dedicated to rational discourse about a market conceived as a superior information processor ended up praising and promoting ignorance. These, I trust, are stances so incongruous, such howling lapses of intellectual decorum, that one cannot imagine that the protagonists themselves did not take note of them. The historical record reveals that they did.
1. The illiberalism and hierarchical control of the MPS.
Can a liberal political program be conceived and prosecuted by means of open discussion with all comers? Hayek, with his sophisticated appreciation for the sociology of knowledge, thought it should not right from the very beginnings of Mont Pèlerin. In 1946, as he toured the United States attempting to drum up support for his new society, he explicitly stipulated that he was “using the term Academy in its original sense of a closed society [my emphasis] whose members would be bound together by common convictions and try to both develop this common philosophy and to spread its understanding.”118 This evocation of Plato’s Academy was not harmless, as he doubtless understood; it has been the recourse of other MPS members whenever the closed, secret nature of the society has been raised. Hayek managed to have his way in this regard—from the start, recruitment, participation, and membership in the NTC has always been strictly controlled from within—but this starkly raises the issue of whether the MPS could practice what it nominally preached. This objection was immediately raised in 1947 by one of the more famous members of the collective, Karl Popper.
Popper had just published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945, attacking Plato, Hegel, and Marx; he was already closely allied with Hayek, who would conspire to bring him to the LSE. Popper notoriously had argued that a regime of open criticism and dispute was the only correct path to political progress; this dovetailed with his influential characterization of science as an ongoing process of conjecture and refutation. Significantly, he pressed this objection upon Hayek almost immediately upon receiving his prospectus for the envisioned organization:
I feel that, for such an academy, it would be advantageous, and even necessary, to secure the participation of some people who are known to be socialists or close to socialism . . . My own position, as you will remember, was always to try for a reconciliation of liberals and socialists . . . This does not, of course, mean that the emphasis on the dangers of socialism (dangers to freedom) should be suppressed or lessened. On the contrary . . . It occurred to me that you might ask me for the names of socialists who might be invited; and I must confess I am at a loss.119
As it happens, due either to lack of “suitable” candidates, or to Hayek’s intransigence on this point, no such diversity of opinion was ever permitted to materialize at the MPS meetings. All discussion was kept within a small circle of political enthusiasm, more often than not held together by what they jointly opposed, rather than some shared Utopia. Popper continued to argue at early MPS meetings against the idea that fruitful discussions of politics required prescreening for ideological homogeneity, or as it was delicately put, “common basic assumptions”; but essentially, he was ignored.120 Many other participants, rather, expressed concern that ideological agreement was already not being sufficiently policed; a few, such as Maurice Allais, withdrew due to its perceived dogmatism. As he explained his reservations to Hayek:
The entire issue is to know if the envisioned group wants in the future to coalesce around a rigid dogmatism or if, on the contrary, it wants in its very organization to maintain the principle of liberal thought, of liberal discussion, within the cadre of principles generally accepted by all. Is it a matter of creating a political action group or a society for the defense of private property, or on the contrary, is it a matter of founding a society of thought capable of reexamining without bias all the questions up for debate and of initiating the foundation of a genuine and effective renewal of liberalism?121
Hayek clearly opted for having both simultaneously, but to make it work, there had to be high barriers to entry, and a putsch or two along the way.122 A clash of worldviews on home turf was to be avoided at all costs. For good or for ill, the MPS rapidly evolved into a closed society with a rather stringent ideological litmus test.
This raises the difficult issue of whether the “Open Society” really works the way it was portrayed by Popper, and still sometimes evoked by the NTC when waxing catholic. Many writers have noted in detail how Popper’s vision proved incompatible with that of Hayek; many philosophers of science have rejected Popper’s vision of how science actually works.123 But Popper himself at least glimpsed that his youthful exaltation of tolerance for unlimited criticism was unavailing in many circumstances that resembled those the MPS was constructed to counter. For instance, in a long footnote in Open Society he grants the plausibility of paradoxes of tolerance (“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”) and democracy (“the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule”), but had little to offer concerning how those paradoxes should be defanged. Yet around the same time, Popper was already flirting with the Hayekian “solution”: membership in the Open Society had to be prescreened to conform to a “minimum philosophy”: but the principles of selection for that philosophy were never made as explicit as they were by Hayek in practice.124
Here, I believe, we can witness the birth of one of the trademark “double truth” doctrines of neoliberalism at the MPS. By professing a continuation of classical liberalism to outsiders, neoliberals lauded a tolerant open society that let all positions have a fair hearing and full empirical test. Hayek’s Road is written in this register, with its dedication, “To socialists of all parties.” Divergent views should compete and be criticized from the opposing camp. Everyone, they said, was welcome to participate. Yet there abided a closed subset of MPS insiders who recognized the force of the paradoxes of tolerance and democracy; and consequently they ran their thought collective as an exclusive hierarchical organization, consisting of members preselected for conformity, which encountered opposed conceptions of the world only
