Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
with the religious right and the theocons within the neoliberal framework has been an ongoing project at the MPS, although one fraught with contradictions that have dogged the liberal project since the Enlightenment.114
These thirteen more or less echt-commandments gathered here characterize the rough shape of the program eventually arrived at by the Neoliberal Thought Collective. In this summary, I have sought to highlight the stark divergence from both classical liberalism and libertarianism; further, the individual tenets will also serve as touchstones for our account of the intellectual history of the global economic crisis in subsequent chapters. Yet, having strained to discern unity in what sometimes appears a free-for-all, we should now confront the contrary proposition—that neoliberalism, in some fundamental conceptual sense, does not hang together in actual practice.
Neoliberalism, the Crisis, and the Double Truth Doctrine
All political movements of whatever stripe frequently find themselves in the position of needing to deny something they have affirmed in the past. If politics were the realm of consistency, and consistency the bugaboo of small minds, then zealots would indeed inherit the earth. Acknowledging that, there seems to be nonetheless something a little unusual going on in the Neoliberal Thought Collective, and I think it can be understood, if not entirely justified, by recourse to the doctrine of “double truth.”
Just to be clear about the nature of what will be asserted, I am not referring here to the Platonic doctrine of the “noble lie,” nor the Latin Averroist precepts concerning the tensions between philosophic reason and faith. Neither is it the “doublethink” of Orewellian provenance, which has more to do with the state twisting the meaning of words. It may have some relationship to the thought of Leo Strauss—the hermeneutic awareness that “all philosophers . . . must take into account the political situation of philosophy, that is, what can be said and what must be kept under wraps,” as the Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss puts it—but exploring the possible Chicago connections between his writings and the neoliberals would be too much of a distraction, given all the other topics we must cover.115 What I shall refer to here is the proposition that an intellectual thought collective might actually concede that, as a corollary of its developed understanding of politics, it would be necessary to maintain an exoteric version of its doctrine for the masses—because that would be safer for the world and more beneficial for ordinary society—but simultaneously hold fast to an esoteric doctrine for a small closed elite, envisioned as the keepers of the flame of the collective’s wisdom. Furthermore, whereas both the exoteric and esoteric versions would deal with many similar themes and issues, the exoteric version might appear on its face to contradict the esoteric version in various particulars. It will be necessary to explore the possibility that these seeming contradictions are not cynical in the modality one often encounters in career politicians, but rather grow organically out of the structural positions that motivate the thought collective.
I don’t think it has gone unnoticed that the NTC embodies a budget of paradoxes, to put it politely. It starts with the strange behavior we already encountered: the neoliberals had begun acknowledging in the 1930s–’50s that they were in pursuit of something “neo,” only to subsequently deny all divergence from an ancient time-honored “liberalism,” against all evidence to the contrary. Subsequently, the continuity story became the exoteric stance, whereas the “neo” remained an esoteric appreciation. But then the dichotomy expands into all manner of seemingly incompatible positions. As Will Davies has put it: market competition should stand as a guarantor of democracy, but not vice versa; unimpeded economic activity would guarantee political freedom, but not vice versa. Yet, curiously, this did not apply to Mont Pèlerin itself.116
The Neoliberal Thought Collective tamed many of the contending contradictory conceptions of the “good society” documented in this volume by trying to have it both ways: to stridently warn of the perils of expanding purview of state activity while simultaneously imagining the strong state of their liking rendered harmless through some instrumentality of “natural” regulation; to posit their “free market” as an effortless generator and conveyor belt of information while simultaneously strenuously and ruthlessly prosecuting a “war of ideas” on the ground; asserting that their program would lead to unfettered economic growth and enhanced human welfare while simultaneously suggesting that no human mind could ever really know any such thing, and therefore that it was illegitimate to justify their program by its consequences; to portray the market as something natural, yet simultaneously in need of solicitous attention to continually reconstruct it; to portray their version of the market as the ne plus ultra of all human institutions, while simultaneously suggesting that the market is in itself insufficient to attain and nourish transeconomic values of a political, social, religious, and cultural character. “Neoliberal writings on allocation shift back and forth between libertarian and utilitarian vocabularies, with the two sometimes appearing interchangeably within a paper or chapter.”117 This ability to vertiginously pivot between paragraphs should itself be considered a political technology of the NTC.
The proliferation of straddles cannot be chalked up to mere pluralism of voices, inadequate critical attention, or absentmindedness. Few political doctrines have undergone the sustained extent of internal criticism of neoliberalism at Mont Pèlerin. All systems sport a modicum of internal contradictions as they age; but these particular discordances appear to betoken some structural problems within the neoliberal program, which have been dealt with in the recent past through application of the double-truth principle. I opt to cover three such contradictions here, which are arguably central to an understanding of the crisis: (1) that a society dedicated to liberal ideals had to resort to illiberal procedures and practices; (2) that a society that held spontaneous order as the ne plus ultra of human civilization had to submit to heavy regimentation and control; and (3) that a society dedicated to rational discourse about a market conceived as a superior information processor ended up praising and promoting ignorance. These, I trust, are stances so incongruous, such howling lapses of intellectual decorum, that one cannot imagine that the protagonists themselves did not take note of them. The historical record reveals that they did.
1. The illiberalism and hierarchical control of the MPS.
Can a liberal political program be conceived and prosecuted by means of open discussion with all comers? Hayek, with his sophisticated appreciation for the sociology of knowledge, thought it should not right from the very beginnings of Mont Pèlerin. In 1946, as he toured the United States attempting to drum up support for his new society, he explicitly stipulated that he was “using the term Academy in its original sense of a closed society [my emphasis] whose members would be bound together by common convictions and try to both develop this common philosophy and to spread its understanding.”118 This evocation of Plato’s Academy was not harmless, as he doubtless understood; it has been the recourse of other MPS members whenever the closed, secret nature of the society has been raised. Hayek managed to have his way in this regard—from the start, recruitment, participation, and membership in the NTC has always been strictly controlled from within—but this starkly raises the issue of whether the MPS could practice what it nominally preached. This objection was immediately raised in 1947 by one of the more famous members of the collective, Karl Popper.
Popper had just published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945, attacking Plato, Hegel, and Marx; he was already closely allied with Hayek, who would conspire to bring him to the LSE. Popper notoriously had argued that a regime of open criticism and dispute was the only correct path to political progress; this dovetailed with his influential characterization of science as an ongoing process of conjecture and refutation. Significantly, he pressed this objection upon Hayek almost immediately upon receiving his prospectus for the envisioned organization:
I feel that, for such an academy, it would be advantageous, and even necessary, to secure the participation of some people who are known to be socialists or close to socialism . . . My own position, as you will remember, was always to try for a reconciliation of liberals and socialists . . . This does not, of course, mean that the emphasis on the dangers of socialism (dangers to freedom) should be suppressed or lessened. On the contrary . . . It occurred to me that you might ask me for the names of socialists who might