However, in chapter 6, we moot the possibility that the outer shells themselves have developed a generic full-spectrum pattern of political response to dire crises. If true, it means that neoliberalism has become more coherent in the face of the crisis, not more diffuse, as some authors maintain.
A Short Course in Neoliberal Economic Doctrine
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the neoliberal project stood out from other strains of right-wing thought in that it self-consciously was constituted as a multitiered sociological entity dedicated to the continued transnational development, promulgation, and popularization of doctrines intended to mutate over time, in reaction to both intellectual criticism and external events. It was a movable feast, and not a catechism fixed at the Council of Trent.63 Much of the time the litmus test was shared political objectives inculcated through prolonged internship in the thought collective; but infrequently, even that was open to delicate negotiation. Nevertheless, it was a sociological thought collective that eventually produced a relatively shared ontology concerning the world coupled with a more-or-less shared set of propositions about markets and political economy. These propositions are, of necessity, a central focus of a book on the relationship of neoliberals to the crisis. It should be very important to have some familiarity with these ideas, if only to resist simple-minded characterizations of the neoliberal approach to the crisis as some evangelical “market fundamentalism.”
Although it is undeniably the case that all manner of secondhand purveyors of ideas on the right would wish to crow that “market freedom” promotes their own brand of religious righteousness, or maybe even the converse, it nonetheless debases comprehension to conflate the two by disparaging both as “fundamentalism”—a sneer unfortunately becoming commonplace on the left. It seems very neat and tidy to assert that neoliberals operate in a modus operandi on a par with religious fundamentalists: just slam The Road to Serfdom (or if you are really Low-to-No Church, Atlas Shrugged) on the table along with the King James Bible, and then profess to have unmediated personal access to the original true meaning of the only (two) book(s) you’ll ever need to read in your lifetime. Counterpoising morally confused evangelicals with the reality-based community may seem tempting to some; but it dulls serious thought. It may sometimes feel that a certain market-inflected personalized version of Salvation has become more prevalent in Western societies, but that turns out to be very far removed from the actual content of the neoliberal program.
Neoliberalism does not impart a dose of that Old Time Religion. Not only is there no ur-text of neoliberalism; the neoliberals have not themselves opted to retreat into obscurantism, however much it may seem that some of their fellow travelers may have done so. You won’t often catch them wondering, “What Would Hayek Do?” Instead they developed an intricately linked set of overlapping propositions over time—for example, from Ludwig Erhard’s “social market economy” to Herbert Giersch’s cosmopolitan individualism, from Milton Friedman’s “monetarism” to the rational-expectations hypothesis, from Hayek’s “spontaneous order” to James Buchanan’s constitutional order, from Gary Becker’s “human capital” to Steven Levitt’s “freakonomics,” from Heartland’s climate denialism to AEI’s geoengineering project, and, most appositely, from Hayek’s “socialist calculation controversy” to Chicago’s efficient-markets hypothesis. Along the way they have lightly sloughed off many prior classical liberal doctrines—for instance, opposition to corporate monopoly power as politically debilitating, or skepticism over strong intellectual property, or disparaging finance as an intrinsic source of macroeconomic disturbance—without coming clean on their reversals.64
Acknowledgment of neoliberalism as a living, mutating entity makes it hard for people who are not historians to wrap their arms around the phenomenon, and prompts those seeking a three-by-five-card definition to throw up their hands in defeat. Disbelievers and skeptics often scoff when they hear about the mutable character of neoliberal doctrine, but I think they ought to pay a little attention to science studies, which seems quite comfortable tracking functional identity-within-change by combining institutional data with a rotating yet finite roster of protagonists, with an old-fashioned history of ideas. For instance, what did it mean to be “doing quantum physics” in the 1960s and ’70s? It wasn’t just big teams working on solid-state devices plus a few geniuses in pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory. It even extended to hippie communes and New Age consciousness. Or, in another case, the pursuit of cosmological theories has a colorful coherent history, even though it repeatedly transgressed the boundaries of existing sciences, and sometimes had trouble deciding if the object of its attentions typified stark stasis or dramatic metamorphosis.65 As long as we possess similar multiple markers of participation and discernment of designated doctrines for the Neoliberal Thought Collective, from exclusive organizations like the MPS and certain designated think tanks, to denumerable membership lists to vade mecum texts covering keynote ideas and theories, to archival reflections of the principals, then a working characterization of neoliberalism is perfectly possible.
Quite a few perceptive historians of the NTC have worried that this Protean entity might be a little too variable to underwrite serious intellectual analysis.66 “There may therefore be a certain degree of truth in what might otherwise seem to be a sloppy and unprincipled claim, that neoliberalism has become omnipresent, but it is a complex, mediated and heterogeneous kind of omnipresence, not a state of blanket conformity. Neoliberalism has not simply diffused as a (self-) replicating system.”67 Granted, the ectoplasmic theory of mind control is usually a poor way to contemplate analysis of politics; yet the point remains that the neoliberal ground troops seem to be fully capable of recognizing kindred spirits, fostering intellectual interchange among allies, and more to the point, funding and organizing political movements with stable objectives and repetitive arguments even in the face of the global economic crisis. Here we point to bellwether phenomena to be addressed, from the demonization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to the neutralization of financial reform at both national and international levels, the promotion of class warfare against public employees by “populist” right-wing politicians to the total control over framing the problem of global warming, from the best-sellerdom of The Road to Serfdom to the astroturfing of the Tea Party, and, most notably, the pronounced shift of public attention from the culpability of banks and hedge funds to the predominant conviction that the crisis has been attributable to governmental fiscal irresponsibility. These suggest a degree of coherence and stability deriving from both continuity of intellectual tradition and persistence of community boundary work, the sum total of which is capable of supporting analytical generalizations about the movement.
Clearly, neoliberals do not navigate with a fixed static Utopia as the astrolabe for all their political strivings. They could not, since they don’t even agree on such basic terms as “market” and “freedom” in all respects, as we shall observe below. One can even agree with Brenner et al. and Naomi Klein that crisis is the preferred field of action for neoliberals, since that offers more latitude for introduction of bold experimental ‘reforms’ that only precipitate further crises down the road.68 Nevertheless, Neoliberalism does not dissolve into a gormless empiricism or random pragmatism. There persists a certain logic to the way it approaches crises; and that is directly relevant to comprehending its unexpected strength in the current global crisis.
Under that supposition, we endeavor here to provide a telegraphed and necessarily non-canonical characterization of the temporary configuration of doctrines that the thought collective had arrived at by roughly the 1980s. It transgresses disciplinary boundaries, in precisely the ways the neoliberals have done. Furthermore, the Thirteen Commandments below are chosen because they have direct bearing upon unfolding developments during the period of the crisis from 2007 onwards. To elide issues of who said what to whom, in and out of Mont Pèlerin, we provide the tenets in an abridged format of stark statements, without much individual elaboration or full documentation.69
[1] The starting point of neoliberalism is the admission, contrary to classical liberal doctrine, that their vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the conditions for its existence must be constructed, and will not come about “naturally” in the absence of concerted political effort and organization. As Foucault presciently observed in 1978 “Neoliberalism should not be