Neoliberalism’s invisibility was manufactured by both its architects and its critics

Evidence

Indeed, at this late hour, the world is still full of people who believe that neoliberalism doesn’t really exist. I run into them every day. Mitchell Dean nicely captures this attitude: “Neoliberalism, it might be argued, is a rather overblown notion, which has been used, usually by a certain kind of critic, to characterize everything from a particular brand of free-market political philosophy to a wide variety of innovations in public management.” For such skeptics, it is inconceivable to them that contemporary political economy displays any kind of structure, outside of some vague notions of supply and demand. Most people, it seems, have never even heard of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which at one time in its history was the premier site of the construction of neoliberalism. Liberalism, neoliberalism, conservatism, libertarianism … at least in America, they are all just a blur. People who live elsewhere in the world have little feeling for the American cultural drumbeat that keeps insisting politics has no theoretical grounding—it is only something dubbed “human nature” that can be theorized. America, that fabled Land of Neoliberalism in European parlance, soldiers on, blissfully unaware that it is neoliberal. … Part of the blame might be laid at the door of the neoliberals themselves: as I document below, even though the members of Mont Pèlerin Society initially used the term “neoliberal” to refer to themselves in the early 1950s, by the 1960s they had backtracked, trumpeting the ambagious notion that their ideas all could be traced back to Adam Smith, if not before. But an equal moiety of blame should be dished out to their opponents on the left, who often bandy about attributions of “neoliberalism” as a portmanteau term of abuse when discussing grand phenomena often lumped together under the terminology of “globalization” and “financialization” and “governmentality.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 77

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: why America is the ‘Land of Neoliberalism’ that doesn’t know it — the deliberate erasure of theoretical grounding as itself a neoliberal strategy.
• XREF: Connects to Mirowski’s broader thesis about the Mont Pèlerin Society and the Reagan/Thatcher-era obscuring of the term, and to the ‘thought collective’ framing. — connects to: Neoliberalism was both a class-power project and a coherent ideology. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 478; Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439; A contemporary critic charged neoliberals with insulating themselves from serious outside intellectual challenge — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 578 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Both the Mont Pèlerin Society and its leftist critics obscured what neoliberalism is #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 77
• A contemporary critic charged neoliberals with insulating themselves from serious outside intellectual challenge #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 578
• Neoliberalism’s political strength partly derives from being poorly understood #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 81