Neoliberal ideas reframed anti-union business positions as good judgment rather than reactionary politics

Evidence

While the American meeting gave the intellectuals new reasons to fear the strings that seemed to come with the involvement of donors, the conference at Princeton did not mark the end of the broader relationship between businessmen and the high theorists of the Mont Pèlerin Society. On the contrary, the connections between the business world and that of think tanks and intellectual organizations would only deepen over the years to come. … Free market economists—including Society members—spoke at meetings of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and the Crotonville School of General Electric. … And while Hayek was not setting labor policy at American corporations, his ideas helped to legitimate the rising tide of antiunion sentiment throughout business in the late 1950s. The ideas and arguments of the neoliberal thinkers helped to transform the opposition to unions and the welfare state from reactionary politics to good judgment in the public mind. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1474

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader historiography of how think tanks legitimate business interests — David Harvey’s and Wendy Brown’s accounts of neoliberal hegemony-building. — connects to: Resentment of unions can express democratic individualism rather than pre-fascism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1823; Neoliberal thinkers reframed corporate wage-labor as entrepreneurial to counter Schumpeterian decline fears. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 284; Neoliberalism reframed democracy and unions as enemies of market truth. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 123 (+8 more)