nakedcapitalism | NT: Your new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, is
not the first work you have produced that discusses Neoliberalism. In
the Postscript to the book you edited entitled “The Road from Mont
Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective” you state
that:
[O]ur own guiding heuristic has been that Neoliberalism has not existed in the past as a settled or fixed state, but is better understood as a transnational movement requiring time and substantial effort in order to attain the modicum of coherence and power it has achieved today. It was not a conspiracy; rather, it was an intricately structured long-term philosophical and political project, or in our terminology, a “thought collective”.
Given this context, could you explain what the salient features of
Neoliberalism are? In particular it would be helpful if you explained
about why “traditional” approaches to intellectual history are
inadequate for understanding Neoliberalism.
PM: Standard history of economics has been mired in the
primacy of the individual author/intellectual for quite some time now.
There, one tends to become attached to some particular intellectual
hero, reads everything they wrote, and hence seeks to channel ‘their’
ideas to a general audience. Maybe one consults a few of their allies or
opponents to add a dash of ‘context’. This, perhaps inadvertently, has
resulted in deep misunderstanding of how economics has developed over
the last century or more.
Ideas generally don’t incubate like that. Traditions in the history and sociology of science [my current disciplinary home]
have developed a number of methods and devices in order to highlight
the elaborate social character of intellectual disciplines, and display
the complex trajectories of validation of knowledge. The landmarks there
are many, but the one I lean upon in Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste is the concept of a ‘thought collective’ that dates back to the work of Ludwik Fleck.*
Whatever one thinks of the specifics, that framework has permitted me
to write a history of Neoliberalism which comes to terms with some of
its more slippery aspects. In the first instance, it nurtures
appreciation for the fact that Neoliberalism is both a set of
philosophical doctrines – and not, as some would have it, a narrow few
abstract propositions in economics—and a flexible ongoing political
project. The doctrines and the details of the project change through
time, as do the roster of protagonists, but still maintain a coherence
and stability that justifies treating the movement as an historical
collective. Next, it insists that Neoliberalism cannot be reduced to the
writings of the few standout neoliberals that readers of this blog may
have heard of – Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Gary
Becker – primarily because their individual tenets conflict, some with
each other, and some with some other less famous comrades. Fleck points
us towards the fact that thought collectives are held together, in part,
by formal social structures; in the case of the Neoliberals, it started
out as the Mont Pèlerin Society [MPS] in 1947, but by the 1980s it was
extended to a connected ring of think tanks around the world, from the
Institute for Economic Affairs to the American Enterprise Institute to
Heritage and Cato to the Atlas Foundation and beyond. As early as 1956,
the Volker Fund maintained a list of 1,841 affiliated individuals; the
corresponding number easily exceeds the tens of thousands today. Clearly
the thought collective harbors strong impressions of who is in and who
is out.
Perhaps more importantly, the ‘thought collective’ approach has
helped me grapple with one of the most nettlesome aspects of
Neoliberalism: How can one write an intellectual history of a bunch of
anti-intellectual intellectuals? Some readers may have encountered
Hayek’s sneers about those whom he dubs ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’;
but that is just symptomatic of a more general stance towards knowledge
which sets the Neoliberals apart from almost every other thought
collective in recent history. As I explain in Chapter 2, the MPS became a
society of ‘rationalists’ who ended up promoting ignorance as a virtue
for the larger population. Others have also documented this straddle in
their think tank perimeter, such as Tom Medvetz in his Think Tanks in America. It seems we are not in Kansas anymore (apologies to Tom Frank).
Thus, to write a history of Neoliberalism in the current crisis,
Fleck counsels one must connect their various epistemic attitudes to the
content of their doctrines. In the case of modern Neoliberalism, this
has been made manifest in their shared conviction that The Market
knows more than any human being, however wise or well-schooled.
Planning is doomed; socialism is a pipe dream. The political project of
Neoliberalism is not laissez-faire; rather, it is to use state
power to get the populace to prostrate themselves before the only
dependable source of Truth and Wisdom in human civilization—viz.,
something they call “The Market”. The more discombobulated the average citizen can be rendered, the quicker they will get with the program
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