Neoliberal political success hollowed out the MPS into a status symbol

Evidence

One consideration which factors into this statistic is the observation that, while the MPS was once the core furnace of intellectual white heat in forging new ideological principles in the first four decades of its existence, its centrality to the neoliberal project has diminished as we approach the present, and its intellectual heat has cooled appreciably. In effect, the level of practical success of neoliberal politics has resulted in the core now being primarily populated by affluent people who view membership as a status symbol, another Davos to inscribe on the social calendar, rather than joining a hand-picked crew of innovative thinkers cloistered away in intense debate and subtle disputation. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 508

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A paradoxical inversion: ideological victory transformed the intellectual vanguard into a social club, raising deep questions about how movements metabolize their own success.
• XREF: connects to: Friedman’s media omnipresence broke the MPS’s elite-only public reserve — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 497; Until the 1980s the MPS network reliably identified genuine neoliberal actors — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2113; The MPS concealed its organizational sponsorship of scholarly books it printed — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1344