MPS fused disciplines and professions into a transacademic knowledge machine beyond single disciplines

Evidence

The MPS community of neoliberal intellectuals was not restricted by a standard (pluralist, apolitical) understanding of a rigid separation of academic disciplines, or by the need to develop knowledge in a few restricted single-issue areas. Instead, the collective effort can be described as transdisciplinary (developing norms and principled beliefs guiding students in different disciplines), interdisciplinary (though mainly involving social scientists), and transacademic (though the endeavors to connect to particular audiences and the public at large were in the main organized indirectly through think tanks and publishers). … Scholars from different disciplines shared their expertise and debated with a select group of journalists, corporate leaders, and politicians, as well as a new breed of knowledge professionals (operating out of the rapidly proliferating neoliberal partisan think tanks). Each of these groups contributed its special resources and competencies to the collective effort. The whole truly was more than the sum of its parts, constituting complex and efficient knowledge machinery. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the three defining axes of the MPS’s structure: transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transacademic — key metadata for how the network operated.
• XREF: Parallels the reader’s prior reading on epistemic communities and the Milgrom trade institutions material — both about how institutional structures solve coordination and knowledge problems. — connects to: Colonial knowledge-gathering fused governance questions with totalizing encyclopedic cataloguing — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 202; Modern state power and the fact-value split jointly enabled power-knowledge fusion — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 168; Knowledge-producing disciplines were mobilized in service of imperialist worldviews — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 77 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 86

Broader Connections

• Colonial knowledge-gathering fused governance questions with totalizing encyclopedic cataloguing #corroborates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 202
• Knowledge-producing disciplines were mobilized in service of imperialist worldviews #expands (0.73) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 77
• Modern state power and the fact-value split jointly enabled power-knowledge fusion #corroborates (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 168
• Learned fields constrain individual scholarship through cumulative institutional consensus #qualifies (0.72) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 506