Early neoliberals used film and education to make market mechanics visible

Evidence

Taking it upon himself to correct the situation, Polanyi produced an educational motion picture expounding the workings of a market economy which aimed at embedding in the public spirit an expert understanding of the economic mechanism. Inspired by Keynes’s General Theory, the film centered around the representation of the money belt, streaming from industries, to shops, to consumers, with a central bank regulating the flow of spending and saving. Praising the film’s semiotic properties, which allowed an invisible complex structure to be seen and thus understood, Polanyi was optimistic about its educational impact on the lay masses, hoping it would turn them away from central planning and restore their confidence in a market economy. A society so transformed by this effort to publicize the coordinating virtues of markets would fulfil the “promise of liberalism”: the social integration achieved in the Soviet Union through public emotion and propaganda could be accomplished in liberal societies through reason and public education. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter theme (Beddeleem on ordoliberalism/social-liberal networks) and to the broader literature on how neoliberal thought was popularized, e.g. the role of think tanks and media in later decades. — connects to: Neoliberals marketed the market as natural by borrowing early evolutionary science metaphors — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2127; Neoliberalism persists through pervasive cultural imagery, not popular political theory — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 246; Neoliberalism works best when subjects willingly internalize market logic through everyday micro-interactions
• SEED: Angle: the little-known history of the ‘economic propaganda film’ as a tool of early neoliberal public education — today’s economics communication owes more to this 1930s effort than to Keynesian textbook culture.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism persists through pervasive cultural imagery, not popular political theory #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 246
• Neoliberals marketed the market as natural by borrowing early evolutionary science metaphors #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2127
• Neoliberalism works best when subjects willingly internalize market logic through everyday micro-interactions #expands (0.80)