Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
to “suspend” the market in order to save the market.
As in so many other areas, they were merely echoing Schmitt’s position that “Only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free-market economy” and “Only a strong state can generate genuine decentralization, [and] bring about free and autonomous domains.” This was echoed (without attribution) by Hayek: “If we proceeded on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”162
One can therefore only second the verdict of Christi that, “In truth, Hayek owed much to Schmitt, more than he cared to recognize.”163 For Hayek and the neoliberals, the Führer was replaced by the figure of the entrepreneur, the embodiment of the will-to-power for the community, who must be permitted to act without being brought to rational account. While he probably believed he was personally defending liberalism from Schmitt’s withering critique, his own political “solution” ended up resembling Schmitt’s “total state” more than he could bring himself to admit. If it had been apparent to his audience that he was effectively advocating an authoritarian reactionary despotism as a replacement for classical liberalism, it would certainly have not gone down smoothly in the West right after World War II. Further, there was no immediate prospect of a strong authority taking over the American university system (by contrast with Germany in the 1930s) and sweeping the stables clean. In an interesting development not anticipated by Schmitt, Hayek and his comrades hit upon the brilliant notion of developing the “double truth” doctrine of neoliberalism—namely, an elite would be tutored to understand the deliciously transgressive Schmittian necessity of repressing democracy, while the masses would be regaled with ripping tales of “rolling back the nanny state” and being set “free to choose”—by convening a closed Leninist organization of counterintellectuals. There would be no waiting around until some charismatic savior magically appeared to deliver the Word of Natural Order down from the Mont to the awestruck literati. Intellectual credibility could not be left to the vagaries of “spontaneous order.” The constellation of double-truth doctrines enumerated in this chapter are the direct consequence of Schmitt’s definition of politics as the logic of the friend/enemy distinction.
This was sometimes admitted by members of Mont Pèlerin in public, but only when they felt that their program was safely in the ascendant:
Let’s be clear, I don’t believe in democracy in one sense. You don’t believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. You will find it hard to find anybody who will say that if, that is democracy interpreted as majority rule. You will find it hard to find anybody who will say that at 55% of the people believe the other 45% of the people should be shot. That’s an appropriate exercise of democracy . . . What I believe is not a democracy but an individual freedom in a society in which individuals cooperate with one another.164
Christian Arnsperger has captured the double-truth doctrine nicely, by insisting that Hayek had denied to others the very thing that gave his own life meaning: the imprimatur to theorize about “society” as a whole, to personally claim to understand the meaning and purpose of human evolution, and the capacity to impose his vision upon them through a political project verging upon totalitarianism. It was, as Arnsperger puts it, a theory to end all theories; not so different from the “end of history” scenarios so beloved of his epigones. The doctrine of special dispensation for the Elect is one very powerful source of ongoing attractions of neoliberalism, viz., the feeling of having surrendered to the wisdom of the market by coming to know something most of the nattering crowd can’t possibly glimpse: freedom itself must be as unequally distributed as the riches of the marketplace.165
Of course, any embittered autodidact in his darkened room is “free” to believe that he deserves the same intellectual dispensation as the one eventually granted to Hayek. The world is full of minor Raskolnikovs with their contempt and disdain for the ignorant herd. But therein lies the critical difference, which is the most important fact for understanding neoliberalism: the NTC had been working assiduously to support his (and their) special vision for decades before his own dispensation came to be taken seriously by the larger culture, as demonstrated in Figure 2.4 in tabulated mentions of Hayek in the press and British Parliament.166 There was always the danger that the masses he had so haughtily disdained would have returned the favor and consigned him to oblivion. The double-truth doctrines we have summarized here did not readily lend themselves to popularization or general acceptance in the postwar milieu. But tremendous effort, team tenacity, and a very timely Nobel Prize revived his prospects.167 And now, if there was ever a figure who received an intellectual boost from the crisis, it would be difficult for them to claim parity with the revival of Friedrich Hayek
Figure 2.4: Mentions of Friedrich Hayek in Various English-Language Sources, 1931–1991
Source: Gilles Cristophe, University of Lille I
In the aftermath of the crisis, Hayek is now treated as a seer of prodigious perspicuity; and at the exhortation of Glenn Beck, his Road to Serfdom has been read (or maybe just scanned) by thousands who will never be bothered to delve much deeper into neoliberalism, or come to comprehend the political project that they feel speaks to them. But then again, it may be because the actual dry and stilted Hayekian encyclicals have less to do with all that than the fact that neoliberal images now so pervade cultural discourse that the situation has far transcended explicit political theory.168
In the next chapter, we leave the scriptures behind, to begin to contemplate everyday neoliberalism.
The mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in U.S. political life, why the conservative message seems so much more straightforward and stimulating, why they’re all having so much more goddamn fun than the left . . . That the U.S. left enjoyed this sort of energized coalescence in the 1960s and ’70s but has (why not admit the truth?) nothing like it now is what lends many of the left’s complaints about talk radio a bitter whiny edge.1
And that was before the crisis.
Starting from a heightened appreciation for the complexity and double truth of the neoliberal heritage, we can now make a fortified assault on this question: How did neoliberalism apparently come through the crisis unscathed?
Chapter 2 made the case that much hinges upon the interplay of the sociological structure of the Neoliberal Thought Collective built up around the Mont Pèlerin Society and the stratification of esoteric and exoteric doctrines, depending upon one’s location within or without the Russian doll. Briefly reiterating, different cadres are supposed to maintain different understandings of the “true” political implications of the neoliberal project, as one of the internal structural aspects of the project. However, I need to emphasize that, while a necessary precondition, this consilience of doctrine and function is not at all sufficient by itself to “explain” the modern success of the movement. All it accomplished was to help us identify its intellectual provenance and genealogy. The tenacity of neoliberal doctrines that might have otherwise been refuted at every turn since 2008 has to be rooted in the extent to which a kind of “folk” or “everyday” neoliberalism has sunk so deeply into the cultural unconscious that even a few rude shocks can’t begin to bring it to the surface long enough to provoke discomfort.
The relationship between culture and politics is an age-old topic that rarely commands much assent. Often one reads statements such as “Culture is now saturated with a market-oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining”; or, “The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms.”2 That is not the claim being argued for in this chapter. Indeed,