Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
usually “simple” and intentionally set up to serve a preconceived set of purposes. The kosmos, or spontaneous order, grew up organically without intended purpose, although it would persist due to the fact that it performed certain unforeseen functions in a superior manner. Participants didn’t need to know or understand the rules of a kosmos to go with the flow, but generally had to be compelled to follow the rules of a taxis. In his usual subtle manner, after defining it, Hayek invested the notion of taxis with negative connotations, and then equated it with institutions of formal government; whereas the kosmos came endowed with all manner of positive connotations, only to imperceptibly turn into his own neoliberal conception of the market.130
All this taxonomizing was fine; but the question that was motivating Hayek, even if he never adequately addressed it directly, was: What sort of “order” was the MPS, and what sort of order was the Neoliberal Thought Collective dedicated to bringing about?131 The provisional answer began by blurring the boundaries of the sharp distinction he had just wrought: “while the rules on which a spontaneous order rests may also be of spontaneous origin, this need not always be the case . . . it is possible that an order which would still have to be described as spontaneous rests on rules which were entirely the result of deliberate design . . . collaboration will always rest both on spontaneous order as well as deliberate organization.”132 Here he elided acknowledgment that the MPS and the larger NTC did not themselves qualify as a spontaneous order, if only because it was predicated upon stipulated rules that were not the same for all members; nor were they independent of any common purpose. When you unpacked all the shells of the Russian doll, it was just another elaborate hierarchical political movement.
But perhaps this might be mitigated in the instance it could be regarded as a mongrel amalgam of taxis and kosmos. Certainly, intentional stipulation could potentially have unintended consequences, which meant that almost any phenomenon was a mare’s nest of both kosmos and taxis elements; but Hayek decided he could not condone such promiscuity:
[I]t is impossible, not only to replace spontaneous orders by organization and at the same time to utilize as much of the dispersed knowledge of all its members as possible, but also to improve or correct this order by interfering in it by direct commands. Such a combination of spontaneous order and organization it can never be rational to adopt.133
Since Hayek’s original point had been that no one “rationally” adopts a kosmos, here was where his construct broke down. Either the dividing line between kosmos and taxis was bright and clear, and the MPS was an example of a taxis, which was thus illegitimate by his own lights, or else kosmos and taxis were hopelessly intertwined, but then there was no dependable way in his system to separate “government” from “market,” and the politics of the NTC would threaten to become unintelligible. The Hayekian wing of the thought collective has never been able to square this circle, so it has to resort to double-truth tactics. For outsiders, neoliberal thinkers are portrayed as plucky individual rebel blooms of rage against the machine, arrayed against all the forces of big government and special interests, and in a few hyperbolic instances, even against the “capitalists.”134 They are neither sown nor cultivated, but are like unto dandelions after a spring rain, pure expressions of the kosmos. But once initiated into the mysteries of the thought collective, only the organization men rise to the top, and they know it. The Richard Finks, Leonard Reads, and Antony Fishers of the world are the true movers and shakers of the neoliberal movement, not some blogger in a basement. Salarymen are the purest expression of taxis, but must not say so.
In my opinion, the most perceptive and honest attempt to address the straddle between spontaneous order and calculated politics was the legacy of a rather less-cited MPS member (although another winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize), George Stigler. The oral tradition at Chicago had long acknowledged that Stigler’s approach to the ultimate purpose of economics was different from that of the others:
MILTON FRIEDMAN: There’s no problem [between their respective approaches]. It’s true, that George wanted to change things.
AARON DIRECTOR: But he preferred to study them, not to change them.
MF: He preferred to say that he preferred to study them . . . It was partly a long-running difference between him and me . . . And he liked to stress, “I just want to understand the world and Milton wants to change it.”135
Stigler’s self-denying ordinance was not, however, the conventional instance of the reticence and humility of the temperate scholar. He was directly responding to the contradiction lodged in the NTC identified in this section. Stigler understood that the Audacity of Intervention was a consequence of an asymmetry in the neoliberal theory of politics:
As I mentally review Milton’s work, I recall no important occasion on which he has told businessmen how to behave. . . . Yet Milton has shown no comparable reticence in advising Congress and the public on monetary policy, tariffs, schooling, minimum wages, the tax benefits of establishing a ménage without benefit of clergy, and several other subjects. . . . Why should businessmen—and customers and lenders and other economic agents—know and foster their own interests, but voters and political coalitions be so much in need of his and our lucid and enlightened instruction?136
Stigler was a true believer in the marketplace of ideas, a neoliberal notion if ever there was one. The public buys the information it wants, and adopts political positions based upon optimal ignorance.137 For Stigler, there was no necessary historical trend or telos toward the neoliberal market. In his books, Friedman’s (and Buchanan’s) quest to educate and edify the unwashed was a miserable waste of time and resources, if one were to believe the neoliberal characterization of the market, and of politics as a market phenomenon. But then, what was the putative function of the Neoliberal Thought Collective? Stigler’s answer was profound: it was to capture the minds of the crucial elites by innovating new economic and political doctrines that those elites would recognize as being in their interest once they were introduced to them (presumably by the outer shells of the neoliberal Russian doll). The MPS was that most noble protagonist, an intellectual entrepreneur; it came up with products before the clientele even knew they wanted them; and what it sold were the tools for those poised to infiltrate the government and immunize policy from the optimally stupid electorate. Technocratic elites could intently maintain the fiction that “the people” had their say, while reconfiguring government functions in a neoliberal direction. These elite saboteurs would bring about the neoliberal market society far more completely and efficaciously than waiting for the fickle public to come around to their beliefs.138 Friedman and Buchanan had sailed too close to the wind in not holding democracy in sufficient contempt; what the neoliberal program counseled was a coup, not a New England town-hall meeting. Stigler did want to change the world, but in a manner more Machiavellian than his peers.139 His was the instruction manual for neoliberals to occupy government, not merely disparage it.
I think that Stigler’s construction of the meaning and purpose of the Neoliberal Thought Collective was the version that won out after the 1980s, in part because it openly embraced the double-truth doctrine, rather than uneasily squirming around it, as Friedman had done. The MPS offered its elite recruits one thing, and the outer shells of the Russian doll another. The exoteric knowledge of the spontaneous order of the market was good enough for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal; the esoteric doctrine of reengineering government to recast society comprised the marching orders of the NTC. Friedman was the public face, Stigler the clan fixer. For the former, the MPS was just another debating society; for the latter, it was the executive committee of the capitalist insurgency.
3. The MPS as a Society of Rationalists promoting ignorance as a virtue.
Many observers have seen fit to comment that the MPS was not a very open society, in the Popperian sense, and that its regimented character may have appeared a bit incongruous given its professed beliefs; but in my opinion, most analysts have fallen down when it comes to this third straddle140. That is a shame, because it will transpire that this particular “double truth” is far and away the most important of the three for understanding how the NTC managed to come through the crisis relatively unscathed.
Hayek is noteworthy in that he placed ignorance at the very center of his political