Neoliberalism emerged from pre-existing transnational elite networks, not a single 1938 event.

Evidence

Reading the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in the context of its time shows that it did not fall from the sky in the summer of 1938 as the first seed of a robust and unchanging worldview of what would later become an ever-growing ideological flora in the Mont Pèlerin Society. It shows that neoliberalism was entrenched from the beginning in transnational elite networks whose goal was (and still is) to define ideas of normative statehood and liberal governance able to keep politics within its “proper limits” while making sure that nation-states share an ideological DNA without being identical. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 401

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the WLC as embedded in an already-formed elite network rather than a founding moment, contesting the standard origin story.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘On Sacrifice’ only loosely; more centrally supports the reader’s core project of fracturing the caricature of neoliberalism as a monolithic ideology with a single birth.