Neoliberal schools offer divergent fictions of law’s neutrality to mask its politicized character.

Evidence

The neoliberals generally have to bend in pretzels to deny that in their ideal state, law is a system of power and command, and is, rather, a system of neutral general rules applicable equally to all, grounded in something other than the intentional goals of some (that is, their own) group’s political will. As Raymond Plant explains, for the Rothbard anarchists, this is something like natural law; for the Buchanan-style public-choice crowd, it is contract theory; for Chicago economics, it is a world where the economy is conflated with the universe of human existence; and for Hayek, it is his own idiosyncratic notion of cultural evolution. In everyday neoliberalism, the Chicago story seems to win out. However, in the recent crisis, the evolution story has been brought out of mothballs, as we shall observe in chapter 6. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 160

Categorization

• XREF: The taxonomy of four neoliberal camps (Rothbard, Buchanan, Chicago, Hayek) maps onto the ‘thought collective’ map Mirowski is constructing; connects to the reader’s earlier chapters on the NTC’s internal diversity. — connects to: Neoliberal authors produce obfuscating scholarship that disguises the movement’s own practices — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1821
• DEFINE: A compact taxonomy of how each neoliberal school grounds the ‘neutrality’ of law.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal authors produce obfuscating scholarship that disguises the movement’s own practices #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1821