Atlas treats ideas as branded products to be marketed and consumed

Evidence

The objective of the ALA is to “apply sound business practices” to the domain of influence building and public policy shaping. As such its training programs progress from basic ideas about the free market to practical business skills: … Freedom is our business: we believe that using the best business methods is the key to advancing the ideas and the policies of freedom. Accordingly, Atlas teams plan strategically, seek the highest value added, engage in competitor analysis, brand our products and use the most suitable marketing techniques to encourage our target markets to “consume” our products, and measure our successes (and our failures). — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 599

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a crystallizing statement of the managerialized, marketized self-image of the modern neoliberal think tank — ideas as consumable products.
• XREF: Resonates with Bernays/PR tradition and the Gramscian notion of organic intellectuals; also with the cherry-picked ‘marketplace of ideas’ rhetoric critiqued elsewhere in the book. — connects to: The Atlas network co-produces and co-diffuses free market content across borders — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 597