to be provocative. Murray Rothbard, from a more libertarian perspective, began to excoriate Friedman for his position. Later classical liberals, dissatisfied specifically with the evolution of the Mont Pèlerin Society, would resort to the term to contrast the position of Ludwig von Mises with what they considered the debased version found in Friedrich Hayek and elsewhere.29 The question of why the target group in and around Mont Pèlerin invoked a self-denying ordinance in using the label is interesting in its own right, and we will return to it in the next section. But for the nonce, I trust everyone can accept that the nominalist position is flawed: the term was and sometimes still is used in a sensible way on both the left and right, and moreover, the roster of people and institutions referenced is fairly stable over time: members of the Mont Pèlerin Society and their close associates. To a first approximation, the MPS will serve as our Rosetta Stone: any idea or person with membership or strong ties to the organization will qualify as “neoliberal.” With further research, we can expand the purview to encompass outer orbits of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
Anyone who has made a study of politics realizes that the conventional left-right continuum needs to be splintered into numerous subsets and offshoots in order to make any intellectual sense of the cacophony of argumentation to be found therein. This admonition needs repetition in the current context, because of the ubiquitous confusion over the referent and meaning of the term “liberal” in America, even at this late date. Every historian of the New Right in America acknowledges that it is a fractious coalition of groups who may not share much in the way of doctrinal overlap: classical liberals, cultural conservatives, theocons, libertarians, old-school anticommunists, anarchists, classical Burkean traditionalists, ultranationalist neoconservatives, strict construction federalists, survivalist militias, and so forth. A standard narrative of historians of the modern right is that a number of these different factions declared a tentative truce from the 1970s onward under the rubric of “fusionism,” and that this détente was a major factor in their resurgence from a low point after the Great Depression.30 Rather than plow old furrows, we shall provisionally accept this basic account for our own purposes, primarily to insist that “neoliberals” should be approached as one individual subset of this phalanx. Hence we seek to characterize a relatively discrete subset of right-wing thought situated within a much larger universe, although it does tend to stand out as the faction most concerned to integrate economic theory with political doctrine. For that reason alone, it is directly germane to a wider purview of the economic crisis.
Much pandemonium concerning the existence of neoliberalism derives from the fact that outsiders often confuse it with libertarianism or classical liberalism; and this, in turn, is at least partly due to the fact that many key neoliberal figures themselves often conflated one or another alternative position with their own. For instance, Friedrich Hayek notoriously pioneered the notion that his own ideas could be traced in a direct line back to classical liberals such as David Hume and Adam Smith.31 Combined with his statement concerning Mont Pèlerin, “I personally do not intend that any public manifesto should be issued,”32 we can begin to detect a concerted policy to blur the boundaries between factions, itself part of the larger move to impose détente. This becomes more obvious in instances when we witness someone like Milton Friedman interacting with other factions on the right:
REASON In seeing yourself harkening back to 19th-century liberalism, you never became a system-builder like Rand or Rothbard . . .
FRIEDMAN Exactly. I’d rather use the term liberal than libertarian.
REASON I see you occasionally use the word libertarian.
FRIEDMAN Oh, I do.
REASON As a concession to accepted usage?
FRIEDMAN That’s right. Because liberal is now so misinterpreted . . . My philosophy is clearly libertarian. However, libertarian is not a self-defining term. There are many varieties of libertarian. There’s zero-government libertarian, an anarchist. There’s a limited-government libertarianism . . . I would like to be a zero-government libertarian.
REASON Why aren’t you?
FRIEDMAN Because I don’t think it’s a feasible social structure.33
No wonder tyros and outsiders get so flummoxed, when it proves hard to get a straight answer from many neoliberals, even when you profess to be on their side. And the more you become familiar with their writings, it often only gets worse: for instance, it would be a long, thankless task to attempt to extract actual libertarian policy proposals from Friedman’s corpus—a complaint one encounters in some actual libertarian writings. They have to avert their eyes from Friedman quotes such as, “You can have a high degree of social freedom, and a high degree of economic freedom without any political freedom.”34 Strident demonization of some bugbear entity called “the government” is not at all the same as rejecting “The State” tout court.35 That is because mature neoliberalism is not at all enamored of the minimalist night-watchman state of the classical liberal tradition: its major distinguishing characteristic is instead a set of proposals and programs to infuse, take over, and transform the strong state, in order to impose the ideal form of society, which they conceive to be in pursuit of their very curious icon of pure freedom. I agree with Wendy Brown that neoliberalism became a “constructivist” project, no matter how much it was a term against which Hayek often railed.36 That neoliberalism turned out to be very nearly the polar opposite of libertarian anarchism is something that has taken a long while to sink in, but is now becoming widely accepted in circles concerned with political economy.37 That is why “neoliberalism” is not only a historically accurate designation of a specific strain of political thought, but it is descriptively acute as well: most of the early neoliberals explicitly distanced themselves from what they considered the outmoded classical liberal doctrine of laissez-faire.38 They sought to offer something newer, and less passive. Later members like James Buchanan were even more frank regarding the neoliberal attraction to the state, at least when addressing the closed meetings of the MPS:
Among our members, there are some who are able to imagine a viable society without a state . . . For most of our members, however, social order without a state is not readily imagined, at least in any normatively preferred sense . . . Of necessity, we must look at our relations with the state from several windows, to use the familiar Nietzschean metaphor . . . Man is, and must remain, a slave to the state. But it is critically and vitally important to recognize that ten per cent slavery is different from fifty per cent slavery.39
Similar sentiments were expressed at other comparable conclaves. For instance, John MacCallum Scott proposed to the 1956 meetings of the Liberal International, “Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed”; the British economist Arthur Shenfield pronounced in a speech to the 1954 MPS conference, “It does no service either to liberalism or to democracy to assume that democracy is necessarily liberal or liberalism is necessarily democratic.”40 Thenceforth, for neoliberals, “freedom” would have to change its connotations.
Thus there are at least two imposing obstacles confronting anyone seeking a deeper understanding of neoliberalism: the fog thrown up around the term “neoliberalism” and attendant doctrines by the participants themselves, in pursuit of their own political unification ambitions and projects with other movements on the right; and the fact that the tenets of neoliberal doctrine evolved and mutated over the postwar period.41 The ten-plus commandments of neoliberalism were not delivered complete and immaculate down from the Mont in 1947, when the neoliberals convened their first meeting of the MPS. Nor can one reliably reconstruct it from a small set of “Hayekian encyclicals,” as Jamie Peck so aptly puts it. In fact, if we simply restrict ourselves to Mont Pèlerin itself (and this is unduly narrow), there rapidly precipitated at least three distinguishable sects or subguilds: the Austrian-inflected Hayekian legal theory, the Chicago School of neoclassical economics, and the German Ordoliberals.42 Hayek himself admitted this in the mid-1980s, when he warned of “the constant danger that the Mont Pèlerin Society might split into a Friedmanite and Hayekian wing.”43 An impartial spectator could observe ongoing tensions between them, but also signs that they eventually cross-fertilized each other. It takes a rather bulky Baedeker to keep it straight;