Early neoliberals shared epistemology with Mannheim while attacking his planning.

Evidence

Mannheim represented one of the most potent intellectual adversaries of early neoliberals because he advertised planning not as a rejection of liberalism but as its most advanced stage, in line with scientific modernity. Like the neoliberals, Mannheim argued against objectivism and scientific detachment and attempted to save a scientifically valid knowledge beyond relativism. While their political conclusions radically diverged, neoliberals shared a substantial number of commitments with Mannheim. First among them was the acknowledgment that knowledge is socially produced and disseminated. Furthermore, Mannheim also advocated environmental interventions—or indirect methods of social control—to orient society from the top, and acknowledged the functional role of the elite above the masses. While criticizing Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, neoliberals would come to build their own “neoliberal” model for the production and diffusion of knowledge in society. From Hayek’s intention to found the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed group of like-minded individuals to his 1949 article on “Intellectuals and Socialism,” neoliberals embraced a sociology of knowledge at the service of their ideological project. What Hayek identified as the hubris of the sociologist would ironically be the position he aimed at occupying with the Mont Pèlerin Society. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the crude caricature that neoliberals were pure laissez-faire empiricists — connects to the reader’s book-level purpose of fracturing stereotype. — connects to: Neoliberal critique deployed a two-pronged argument against planning — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1367; Neoliberal anti-planning arguments rest on the dispersal and tacit character of social knowledge. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 71; Hayek, Polanyi, and Lippmann each reframed planning as an epistemological problem. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 66
• DEEPTHINKING: The irony that Hayek’s attack on sociologist hubris matches his own MPS project is a genuinely layered point about how movements build knowledge infrastructure while disavowing planned knowledge.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal anti-planning arguments rest on the dispersal and tacit character of social knowledge. #expands (0.90) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 71
• Hayek, Polanyi, and Lippmann each reframed planning as an epistemological problem. #corroborates (0.90) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 66
• Neoliberal critique deployed a two-pronged argument against planning #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1367