Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
and eventually to consumers.56
Although the language dealt in terms of “markets” and “consumers,” the reality was a vertically integrated set of operations, whose outlines were apparent by the 1980s. The expansion of the think-tank shell proceeded apace with the expansion of the MPS presence, as revealed in Figure 2.1. One can appreciate the amount of groundwork that had preceded the “breakout” decade of the 1980s for the neoliberal project described by Fink from this and other indicators of the activities of the thought collective.
Figure 2.1: Growth of MPS-Affiliated Think Tanks
Source: Walpen, Die offen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft
Further outer shells have cladded and been augmented around the Russian doll as we get closer to the present—for instance, “astroturf” organizations consisting of supposedly local grass-roots members, frequently organized around religious or single-issue campaigns.57 Some aspects of the so-called Tea Party in the U.S. reveal how the practice of astroturfing has had direct impact upon reactions to the crisis. “FreedomWorks say they hope to turn the inchoate anger of the Tea Party into a focused pro-Hayek movement.”58 Fostering the appearance of spontaneous organization was often just as important for neoliberals as the actual political action that the astroturf organization was tasked to accomplish. 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 noses. This also tended to foster the impression of those “spontaneous orders” so beloved by the neoliberals, although they were frequently nothing of the sort. Moreover, the loose coupling defeated most attempts to paint the thought collective as a strict conspiracy. It was much beyond that, in the sense it was a thought collective in pursuit of a mass political movement; and in any event, it was built up through trial and error over time. It grew so successful, it soon became too large to qualify.
Figure 2.2: MPS Founding Meeting, 1947
The MPS edifice of neoliberalism was anchored by a variety of mainly European and American keystones, progressively encompassed a variety of economic, political, and social schools of thought, and maintained a floating transnational agora for debating solutions to perceived problems, a flexible canopy tailored with an eye to accommodating established relations of power in academia, politics, and society at large. It was never parochial, and was globally oriented before “globalization” became a buzzword. Max Thurn captured this aspect in his opening remarks to the 1964 Semmering MPS meeting:
Many of you have been to Austria before. There is little I can tell them about the country that they do not know already. Others have come for the first time. They may like to get a general idea of what this country was and what it is now before the meeting begins. What I can say on this subject has of course nothing to do with the topics of this programme. As members of the Mont Pèlerin Society we are not interested in the problems of individual nations or even groups of nations. What concerns us are general issues such as liberty and private initiative.59
This division of labor between the global thought collective and the parochial political action rapidly proved a transnational success; and by capping formal membership at five hundred, became another exclusive mark of distinction for famous right-wing aspirants. The global reach of its membership is displayed in the two maps of membership: at its inception, and then in 1991.
Figure 2.3: MPS Membership, 1991
The unusual structure of the thought collective helps explain why neoliberalism cannot be easily inscribed on a set of three-by-five cards, and needs to be understood as a pluralist entity (within certain limits) striving to distinguish itself from its three primary foes: laissez-faire classical liberalism, social-welfare liberalism, and socialism. Contrary to the dichotomies and rigidities that characterized classical liberalism with regard to its proposed firewalls between economics and politics, neoliberalism has to be understood as a flexible and pragmatic response to the previous crisis of capitalism (viz., the Great Depression) with a clear vision of what needed to be opposed by all means: a planned economy and a vibrant welfare state. Contrary to some narrow interests of some corporate captains (including some in the MPS), neoliberal intellectuals understood this general goal to imply a comprehensive long-term reform effort to retat the entire fabric of society, not excluding the corporate world. The relationship between the neoliberals and capitalists was not merely that of passive apologists. Neoliberals aimed to develop a thoroughgoing reeducation effort for all parties to alter the tenor and meaning of political life: nothing more, nothing less.60 Neoliberal intellectuals identified their immediate targets as elite civil society. Their efforts were primarily aimed at winning over intellectuals and opinion leaders of future generations, and their primary instrument was redefining the place of knowledge in society, which also became the central theme in their theoretical tradition. As Hayek said in his address to the first meeting of the MPS:
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.61
The Russian doll structure of the Neoliberal Thought Collective would tend to amplify and distribute the voice of any one member throughout a series of seemingly different organizations, personas, and broadcast settings, lending it resonance and gravitas, not to mention fronting an echo chamber for ideas right at the time when hearing them was most propitious. Not without admiration, we have to concede that neoliberal intellectuals struggled through to a deeper understanding of the political and organizational character of modern knowledge and science than did their opponents on the left, and therefore present a worthy contemporary challenge to everyone interested in the archaeology of knowledge.
Of course, neoliberalism should not then or now be reduced to the MPS and the roster of related think tanks—that would be a travesty of the history.62 My stress on the MPS and the Russian doll serves to counter the tendency on the left to regard neoliberalism as a hopelessly diffuse and ill-defined movement. In subsequent chapters we will explore how neoliberal ideas have become rooted in the economics profession, as well as in many facets of everyday life, which of course extends outside the narrow circumference of MPS activities. And then there are the consequences of transformation of political parties on the right and left, which tend to occupy much more attention in the existing literature. Nevertheless, at least until the 1980s—when the advance of neoliberal ideas, and thus the success of the original neoliberal networks, led to a rapid multiplication of pretenders to the title of progenitors of neoliberalism—the MPS network can be safely used as cipher to decode with sufficient precision the neoliberal thought style in the era of its genesis.
Of course, such considerations do not have the same salience once we get to the current economic crisis. While the detailed research is yet to be conducted, outsider perceptions of the modern MPS suggest that it no longer serves as the cornucopia of blue sky thinking and rigorous debate which then gets conveyed to the outer shells of the Russian doll in the ways that it did during the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the problem seems to have been that, as neoliberals savored political success, membership in the core MPS came to be just another “positional good” especially prized by the idle rich with intellectual pretensions. As the composition of the membership skewed in the direction of the sort of persons more often found at Davos or the Bohemian Grove, the actual role of the core as a high-powered debating society has tended to ossify. That function, it seems, tended to migrate to outer layers of the Russian doll, such as certain key university centers and the larger established think tanks. When the crisis hit, the first tendency was to attempt a reversion to the older model of a Grand Conclave of the Faithful; but as we observed