Chicago School neoliberalism departed from classical and German liberalism over corporate concentration

Evidence

Some of the early neoliberal traditions emphasizing competition have been turned upside down by a specific American current of neoliberal thought. In Chapter 6, Rob Van Horn contrasts German ordoliberal positions to U.S. positions to explain in great detail how the specific Chicago School variety of neoliberalism was developed as a clear departure from traditional liberal concerns about political and economic concentration of power. The Chicago Anti-Trust Project (1953–1957) led by Aaron Director effectively amounted to an apologetic “corporations can do no wrong” perspective, in stark contrast to the classical and the German variety of neoliberalism. … Ordoliberal studies stressing grave problems related to state ownership of railroads in Germany, in comparison with Chicago School research pointing to serious trouble with state regulation of private railroads, served to support one of the central and tenuous conclusions of Chicago School neoliberalism: unregulated private monopoly was a relatively benign phenomenon; the real danger instead emanated from the state and the courts’ lack of economic understanding. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 158

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mirowski/Plehwe historiography of the neoliberal thought collective and to the general contrast between ordoliberalism and US Chicago School; also parallels the reader’s broader austerity/neoliberalism reading on how ‘market competition’ rhetoric was deployed to defend corporate power. — connects to: Neoliberalism broke sharply with prewar classical liberalism rather than continuing it — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 778; Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 175; Neoliberalism reversed classical liberalism’s suspicion of monopoly and corporate power. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2133 (+2 more)
• SEED: An article angle: how the Chicago School inverted classical liberalism’s core fear — from ‘concentration of power is the danger’ to ‘the state is the only real danger, corporate monopoly is benign’ — and how that inversion survives in modern antitrust policy debates.
• DEEPTHINKING: The deep inversion — competition rhetoric redeployed to defend concentration, and courts re-educated to apply economic ‘reason’ rather than rule of law — is a paradigm-level insight about how a school of thought remakes itself while keeping its name.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 158

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism broke sharply with prewar classical liberalism rather than continuing it #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 778
• Neoliberalism reversed classical liberalism’s suspicion of monopoly and corporate power. #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2133
• Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 175