Neoliberalism’s spread depended on transnational discourse networks rather than national institutions alone

Evidence

Although the role of national institutions is indispensable in explaining the advance (or retardation) of specific doctrines across countries, as Peter Hall’s (1989) book on Keynesianism has shown, the origins and the advance of neoliberalism cannot be explained without careful consideration of the transnational discourse community created by the founders of the Mont Pèlerin Society. … Whereas leading neoliberals denied any possibility of mere mortals outcompeting the market as processors of highly dispersed knowledge, their own efforts succeeded in constructing and deploying elaborate social machinery designed to collect, create, debate, disseminate, and mobilize neoliberal ideas. By doing so, they greatly advanced the understanding of a modern reengineered division of intellectual labor with proper roles assigned to academic and other professionals, in what amounts to a new technology of persuasion. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2118

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hall’s 1989 book on Keynesianism as a comparative model — the national-institutions approach the MPS founders challenged. — connects to: Conservative ideas formed through cross-national networks and institutional contexts, not isolated biography. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 27; Global structures enabled ideological community for marginalized intellectual movements — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 147; Hayek believed durable intellectual movements require cross-disciplinary transnational support networks — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 238 (+18 more)
• SEED: The paradox that neoliberals denied the market could be outcompeted in processing dispersed knowledge yet built elaborate machinery to do exactly that — an article on the ‘new technology of persuasion’ as intellectual infrastructure.