Neoliberalism’s freedom ideology borrowed from fascist critics of liberalism
Evidence
Perhaps the greatest incongruity of the Neoliberal Thought Collective has been that the avatars of freedom drew one of their most telling innovations from the critique of liberalism that had been mounted by totalitarian German and Italian political thinkers from the interwar period. Although there were a fair number of such writers who were important for the European MPS members, the one that comes up time and again in their footnotes is Carl Schmitt, whom Hayek called “Adolf Hitler’s crown jurist Carl Schmitt, who consistently advocated the replacement of the ‘normative’ thinking of liberal law by a conception of law which regards as its purpose ‘concrete order formation’”; another was Bruno Leoni, who posited law as something best fortified as resistant to all popular alteration. … Hayek insisted that his central epistemic doctrines about knowledge dictated that freedom must feel elusive for the common man: “Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.” Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, citizens must learn to forget about their “rights” and instead be given the opportunity to express themselves through the greatest information conveyance device known to mankind, the market. The Neoliberal Thought Collective, through the instrumentality of the strong state, sought to define and institute the types of markets that they (and not the citizenry) were convinced were the most advanced. Hayek’s frequent appeals to a “spontaneous order” often masked the fact that it was the NTC who were claiming the power to exercise the Schmittian “exception” (and hence constitute the sovereignty of the state) by defining things like property rights, the extent of the franchise, constitutional provisions that limit citizen initiatives, and the like. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 234
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core project on how the NTC survived 2008 — this subverts the usual narrative that neoliberalism was a pure free-market project and instead roots it in Schmittian state theory. Also resonates with the law-merchant material on extralegal enforcement and strong institutions. — connects to: Fascism emerges organically from liberalism within a single capitalist social order — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 403; Neoliberals saw economic rights as a path toward totalitarianism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 163; Early European neoliberals privileged economic over political freedom — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 188 (+8 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the avatars of freedom drew their central innovation from totalitarian German and Italian thought — with Hayek himself calling Schmitt “Hitler’s crown jurist” yet reprising his anti-democratic thesis — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting argument that re-reads the entire intellectual pedigree of the movement.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: exactly which Italian thinkers (Gentile? Pareto?) and how far did the NTC actually read Schmitt’s concrete-order-formation legal theory into their constitutional engineering (e.g. the Chilean and German constitutions they helped draft)?
Broader Connections
- Fascism emerges organically from liberalism within a single capitalist social order
#complicates(0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 403 - Neoliberals saw economic rights as a path toward totalitarianism
#complicates(0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 163 - Early European neoliberals privileged economic over political freedom
#corroborates(0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 188 - Neoliberalism fused philosophy of science and political economy against totalitarianism
#qualifies(0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 53