Eighties IP rhetoric reframed intellectual property as exclusion over competition
Evidence
While, as shown above, the received economic analysis was about finding the balance between rewarding innovation and throttling it, campaigners for global IP protection wrapped themselves “in the mantle of property rights.” The new language of IP in the 1980s figured it as “a system to protect and exclude, rather than one based on competition and diffusion.” National competitiveness rather than the competitive order was the watchword, a shift signaled by the Presidential Commission on Industrial Competitiveness created in 1984 and the rise of both competitiveness indices and the competitiveness advice industry. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 198
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did ‘national competitiveness’ displace the ordoliberal ideal of ‘competitive order’ among neoliberal intellectuals — did the two traditions openly conflict?
- DEFINE: Clarifies the internal neoliberal distinction between a competitive order (ordoliberal market-structure ideal) and national competitiveness, which is a competitiveness-index-driven zero-sum frame.
- XREF: connects to: IP rights moved from periphery to center of world economy conflicts since the 1980s — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 163; Neoliberal antitrust claims preceded the empirical work meant to support them — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1175; Neoliberalism makes competition rather than exchange the essence of the market — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 59 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism makes competition rather than exchange the essence of the market
#expands(0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 59 - Neoliberal antitrust claims preceded the empirical work meant to support them
#complicates(0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1175