Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
it happens, due either to lack of “suitable” candidates, or to Hayek’s intransigence on this point, no such diversity of opinion was ever permitted to materialize at the MPS meetings. All discussion was kept within a small circle of political enthusiasm, more often than not held together by what they jointly opposed, rather than some shared Utopia. Popper continued to argue at early MPS meetings against the idea that fruitful discussions of politics required prescreening for ideological homogeneity, or as it was delicately put, “common basic assumptions”; but essentially, he was ignored.120 Many other participants, rather, expressed concern that ideological agreement was already not being sufficiently policed; a few, such as Maurice Allais, withdrew due to its perceived dogmatism. As he explained his reservations to Hayek:
The entire issue is to know if the envisioned group wants in the future to coalesce around a rigid dogmatism or if, on the contrary, it wants in its very organization to maintain the principle of liberal thought, of liberal discussion, within the cadre of principles generally accepted by all. Is it a matter of creating a political action group or a society for the defense of private property, or on the contrary, is it a matter of founding a society of thought capable of reexamining without bias all the questions up for debate and of initiating the foundation of a genuine and effective renewal of liberalism?121
Hayek clearly opted for having both simultaneously, but to make it work, there had to be high barriers to entry, and a putsch or two along the way.122 A clash of worldviews on home turf was to be avoided at all costs. For good or for ill, the MPS rapidly evolved into a closed society with a rather stringent ideological litmus test.
This raises the difficult issue of whether the “Open Society” really works the way it was portrayed by Popper, and still sometimes evoked by the NTC when waxing catholic. Many writers have noted in detail how Popper’s vision proved incompatible with that of Hayek; many philosophers of science have rejected Popper’s vision of how science actually works.123 But Popper himself at least glimpsed that his youthful exaltation of tolerance for unlimited criticism was unavailing in many circumstances that resembled those the MPS was constructed to counter. For instance, in a long footnote in Open Society he grants the plausibility of paradoxes of tolerance (“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”) and democracy (“the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule”), but had little to offer concerning how those paradoxes should be defanged. Yet around the same time, Popper was already flirting with the Hayekian “solution”: membership in the Open Society had to be prescreened to conform to a “minimum philosophy”: but the principles of selection for that philosophy were never made as explicit as they were by Hayek in practice.124
Here, I believe, we can witness the birth of one of the trademark “double truth” doctrines of neoliberalism at the MPS. By professing a continuation of classical liberalism to outsiders, neoliberals lauded a tolerant open society that let all positions have a fair hearing and full empirical test. Hayek’s Road is written in this register, with its dedication, “To socialists of all parties.” Divergent views should compete and be criticized from the opposing camp. Everyone, they said, was welcome to participate. Yet there abided a closed subset of MPS insiders who recognized the force of the paradoxes of tolerance and democracy; and consequently they ran their thought collective as an exclusive hierarchical organization, consisting of members preselected for conformity, which encountered opposed conceptions of the world only in highly caricatured versions produced by their own true believers. Esoteric knowledge was transgressive: a liberalism for the twenty-first century could be incubated and sustained only by an irredeemably illiberal organization. Part of the price of admission was initiation into the double truth of the “minimum philosophy”: insiders could learn to live with this esoteric doctrine after a long period of apprenticeship. Outsiders need never know anything about it, and could persist snug in their belief that liberalism meant the tolerant dialogue of the open society; of course, they need never apply to actually enter the MPS.
2. The MPS as regimented controlled society dedicated to the doctrine of “spontaneous order.”
As in the previous case, the internal MPS membership themselves were first to comment on the incongruity of this situation. As the house historian of the MPS reports, Milton Friedman joked in a letter to Hayek, “Our faith requires that we are skeptical of the efficacy, at least in the short run, of organized efforts to promulgate [MPS doctrines].”125 The problem, quite clearly, was if the neoliberal portrait of market order was so overwhelmingly superior, then why hadn’t it just naturally come to dominate all other economic forms? Why hadn’t it already summoned the spirit of liberalism that would guarantee it to flourish? Who really needed the shock troops of the Neoliberal Thought Collective? Classical liberals had adopted the consistent position either that it already had or would happen inexorably, so just sit back and enjoy the inexorable trend of history. Neoliberals had rejected all that in favor of an activist stance, but then had to face up to the vexatious intellectual lack of consilience between their sneers at the impudence of the will to planning and their own presumption of the utter nobility of their own will to power. In other words, how could they justify the Audacity of Intervention, or as James Buchanan so cagily posed the question by misrepresenting their own program as classically liberal:
The classical liberal, in the role of social engineer, may, of course, recommend institutional laissez faire as a preferred policy stance. But why, and under what conditions, should members of the citizenry, or of some ultimate political decision authority, accept this advice more readily than that proffered by any other social engineer?126
As we have now grown accustomed, there existed more than one engagement with this conundrum within the Neoliberal Thought Collective; however, this fact should be understood as intimately entwined with the double-truth doctrine. Although I expect further research will uncover further variants, I will briefly point to three responses within the MPS.
The first response was that pioneered by Milton Friedman, and, it so happens, James Buchanan. The story here went that modern government was an aberration in the history of civilization, one that continually sought to leverage its massive power into engrossment of even more power, growing like a cancer on the otherwise healthy body of market society. Friedman in particular took the position that if he could explain this in simple and compelling ways to the public, in short sentences and punchy proposals and catchy slogans, they would respond favorably to his image of natural order, and voluntarily accept the political prescriptions offered them by the NTC.127 All that was required to offset the wayward course of history was some media coverage of a plucky little David standing up to the governmental Goliath. Friedman was the master of the faux-sympathetic stance, “I just want what you want; but the government never gives it to us. I can.”128 He remained faithful to this prescription to a fault, expending prodigious efforts on popular books, a television series, his Newsweek column, and his indefatigable willingness to debate the most diversified opponents on stages all over the world. He even bequeathed his fortune to fund the effort to undermine state-sponsored primary education, since that was where the state had brainwashed the largest number of tender minds. Of course, this notion of expert tutelage constituted the most superficial response that would have occurred to any postwar American economist of whatever stripe, given the presumptive role of the expert during the Cold War era.129 In that frame, the people were a featureless lump of clay to be molded by the charismatic expert. Friedman did in fact become the public face of the NTC in America from the 1960s to the 1990s; but his position was pitched too far into Pollyanna territory, and gave too many hostages to “democracy,” to suit the tougher-minded souls in the MPS.
The second, richer and more complex answer was proffered by Hayek. He did strive to maintain that there was a natural telos driving history in the neoliberal direction (although this surfaced only late in his career), but the obstacle to its realization was the treason of the intellectuals. He notoriously dismissed these “second-hand dealers in ideas,” and convened Mont Pèlerin as a countermovement to neutralize them politically in the longer run. This hostility was shared by many other members of the MPS, from Bertrand de Jouvenel to Raymond Aron. However, this set up a dynamic where Hayek eventually felt he had to distinguish between legitimate and fake organizations, or what