Early neoliberals rejected empiricism for a critical conventionalism of knowledge.

Evidence

This chapter has shown how the production of a neoliberal epistemology supported the ideological project of revamping liberalism on a new scientific basis. Many of the subsequent theoretical elaborations within neoliberalism derived from the common epistemological framework drawn here. On the theoretical level, early neoliberals sought to distance themselves from the rationalism, empiricism, and naturalism which prevailed in classical liberalism, and to adopt a critical conventionalism, where knowledge and truths were established intersubjectively in a constant process of exchange between theories and the test of experience. As a result, neoliberal thinkers devised a skeptical view of the reach of the social sciences as their prime angle from which to attack competing ideologies promoting an instrumentalist view of knowledge. Paradoxically, they also came to share many premises with the most sophisticated of their adversaries. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contradicts the stereotype of neoliberalism as naive rational-choice empiricism — core to the reader’s purpose of fracturing the caricature. — connects to: Neoliberals rejected treating economics as ironclad natural law — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 194; Neoliberal epistemology developed in pre-1935 philosophy-of-science debates as critical conventionalism. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 34; Neoliberals rejected classical liberalism’s rationalism in favor of critical conventionalism. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 90 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals rejected classical liberalism’s rationalism in favor of critical conventionalism. #corroborates (0.95) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 90
• Early neoliberalism drew on mathematical conventionalism, not naturalism or empiricism #expands (0.90) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 52
• Neoliberalism’s critique of rival ideologies drew on epistemological conventionalism #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 62
• Neoliberalism’s knowledge limits are anti-positivist and extend beyond economics #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 74
• Early neoliberalism emerged partly from a critique of laissez-faire and naturalist philosophies of history #expands (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 379