The neo-liberal thought collective.

AuthorMirowski, Philip
PositionEssay

What is neo-liberalism? How did neo-liberal ideas become so ubiquitous across the globe? The answers to these questions are complex and contested, now more so than ever. In this brief article I will endeavor to give a flavour of their complexity by drawing upon research on the genesis of the neo-liberal 'thought collective' I have recently undertaken in collaboration with colleagues.

What do I mean by a 'thought collective'? The term evokes the spirit of Ludwig Fleck's classic The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact and his notion of 'a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction' (Fleck, 1979, 39). One such community is to be found in the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) network of organised neo-liberal intellectuals and closely related roster of neo-liberal partisan think tanks. In our research, we made use of the Mont Pelerin Society as our Rosetta Stone, a handy detection device to identify the relevant actors, and their linkages to other organisations and institutions (1). At least until the 1980s--when the advance of neo-liberal ideas led to a rapid multiplication of pretenders to the title of progenitors of neo-liberalism--the Mont Pelerin Society network can be safely used as cipher to decode with sufficient precision the neo-liberal thought style and its early diffusion.

The neo-liberal Russian doll

The main reason Mont Pelerin should serve as our talisman is because it exists as part of a rather special structure of intellectual discourse, perhaps unprecedented at the time of the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1940s, one we tend to think of as a 'Russian doll' approach to the integration of research and praxis in the modern world.

The neo-liberal thought collective was structured very differently from the other 'invisible colleges' that sought to change people's minds in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike most intellectuals in the 1950s, the early protagonists of the Mont Pelerin Society did not look to the universities or the academic 'professions' or to specific interest group mobilisations as the appropriate primary vehicles to achieve their goals. The early neo-liberals felt, at that juncture with some justification, that they were excluded from most high-profile intellectual venues in the west.

Hence the Mont Pelerin Society was constituted as a private members-only debating society whose participants were hand-picked (originally primarily by Friedrich 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 to debate the outlines of a future movement, 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 post-war interests. Even the name of the Society was itself chosen to be relatively anodyne, signalling little in the way of substantive content to outsiders (Hartwell, 1995, 44). Many members would indeed hold academic posts in a range of academic disciplines, but this was not a precondition of Mont Pelerin Society membership. The Mont Pelerin Society could thus also be expanded to encompass various powerful capitalist agents.

One then might regard specific academic departments where the neo-liberals came to dominate before 1980 (University of Chicago Economics, the LSE, L'Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales at Geneva, St. Andrews in Scotland, Freiburg, the Virginia School) as the next outer layer of the Russian doll, one emergent public face of the thought collective--although one often never publicly linked to the Mont Pelerin Society.

Another outer shell of the Russian doll was fashioned as the special-purpose foundations for the education and promotion of neo-liberal doctrines, such as the Volker Fund, the Relm Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Foundation for Economic Education. These institutions were often set up as philanthropic or charitable units, if only to protect their tax status and seeming lack of bias (2).

The next shell would consist of general-purpose 'think tanks' (Institute of Economic Affairs, American Enterprise Institute, Schweizerisches Institut fur Auslandforschung [Swiss Institute of International Studies]) that sheltered neo-liberals, who themselves might or might not also be members in good standing of various academic disciplines and universities. The think tanks then developed their own next layer of protective shell, often in the guise of specialised satellite think tanks poised to get quick and timely position papers out to friendly politicians, or provide talking heads for various news media and opinion periodicals (3).

Further outer shells have been innovated as we get closer to the present--for instance, 'astroturfed' organisations consisting of supposedly local grass-roots members, frequently organised around religious or single-issue campaigns (4). Outsiders would rarely perceive the extent to which individual protagonists embedded in a particular shell served multiple roles, or the strength and pervasiveness of network ties, since they could never see beyond the immediate shell of the Russian doll right before their very noses. This also tended to foster the impression of those 'spontaneous orders' so beloved by the neo-liberals, although they were frequently nothing of the sort. Yet the loose coupling defeated most attempts to paint the thought collective as a strict conspiracy (5). In any event, it soon became too large to qualify.

The Mont Pelerin Society construction of neo-liberalism was anchored by a variety of mainly European and American roots; encompassed a variety of economic, political and social schools of thought; and maintained a floating transnational agora for debating solutions to perceived problems and a flexible canopy tailored with an eye to accommodating existing relations of power in academia, politics, and society at large. The unusual structure of the thought collective helps explain why neo-liberalism cannot be easily defined on a set of 3x5 cards, and needs to be understood as a pluralist organism (within certain limits) striving to distinguish itself from its three primary foes: laisser-faire classical liberalism, social welfare liberalism, and socialism.

Contrary to the dichotomies and rigidities that characterised classical liberalism with regard to the relationship between economics and politics, neo-liberalism has to be understood as a flexible and pragmatic response to the then-recent crisis of capitalism (viz., the Great Depression) with a clear vision of what needed to be prevented by all means: a planned economy and a vibrant welfare state.

Contrary to some parochial interests of some corporate captains (including some in the Mont Pelerin Society), neo-liberal intellectuals understood this general goal to imply a comprehensive long-term reform effort at retatting the entire fabric of society, not excluding the corporate world. The relationship between the neo-liberals and capitalists was not merely that of passive apologists (6). Neo-liberals aimed to develop a thoroughgoing re-education effort for all parties to alter the tenor and meaning of political life: nothing more, nothing less. Neo-liberal intellectuals identified their targets, which, in Fabian tradition, had been conceived as elite civil society. Their efforts were primarily aimed at winning over intellectuals and opinion leaders of future generations, and their primary tool was redefining the place of knowledge in society, which also became a central theme in their theoretical tradition. As Hayek said in his address to the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society:

But what to the politicians are fixed limits of practicability imposed by public opinion must not be similar limits to us. Public opinion on these matters is the work of men like ourselves ... who have created the political climate in which the politicians of our time must move ... I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. (quoted in Cockett, 1995, 112) One might have added, how much more powerful are ideas consciously forged with the vested interest firmly in mind! Not without admiration, we have to concede that neo-liberal intellectuals struggled through to a deeper understanding of the political and organisational character of modern knowledge and science than did their opponents.

While the role of national...

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