Neoliberalism defined itself in opposition to the constructed object of the economy

Evidence

The neoliberal movement has a peculiar relationship to wartime and postwar national projects for making “the economy.” On the one hand, neoliberalism came into being as a movement of opposition toward “the economy.” If the economy was in part a product of Keynesian and other forms of planning, calculation, and management, neoliberalism opposed this with the rival concept of the market, whose principles of operation were portrayed as an alternative to the administrative management of “the economy.” On the other hand, as neoliberal think tanks proliferated and began to circulate and promote the ideas of neoliberal academic economists, they became increasingly involved in economic experiments in the world at large. These experiments took place in a world already formatted with the help of economic expertise, whether in the form of earlier Keynesian economic planning or of more recent neoliberal projects. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1919

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes the MPS network’s key intellectual move as a response to mid-century Keynesian construction of the economy, tying into Polanyi’s double movement and Foucault’s biopolitics lectures. — connects to: Neoliberalism pivoted from the economy to the framework encasing it — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 88; Neoliberal freedom culminates in radical solipsism that denies the economy’s existence — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 431; The economy functions as model, object, and project of neoliberal state rationality. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 107 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism is activist constructivism, not laissez-faire passivity. #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2125