Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power

Evidence

The MPS set out in the 1950s entertaining suspicions of corporate power, with the ordoliberals especially concerned with the promotion of strong antitrust capacity on the part of the state. But starting with the Chicago law and economics movement, and then progressively spreading to treatments of entrepreneurs and the “markets for innovation,” neoliberals began to argue consistently that not only was monopoly not harmful to the operation of the market, but an epiphenomenon attributable to the misguided activities of the state and powerful interest groups. The twentieth-century socialist contention that capitalism bore within itself the seeds of its own arteriosclerosis (if not self-destruction) was baldly denied. By the 1970s, antitrust policies were generally repudiated in the United States, as neoliberals took the curious anomaly in American case law treating corporations as legal individuals and tended to inflate it into a philosophical axiom. Indeed, if anything negative was ever said about the large corporation, it was that separation of ownership from control might conceivably pose a problem, but this was easily rectified by giving CEOs appropriate “incentives” (massive stock options, golden handshakes, latitude beyond any oversight) and instituting marketlike evaluation systems within the corporate bureaucracy, rectifying “agency problems.” Thus the modern “reengineering of the corporation” (reduced vertical integration, outsourcing supply chains, outrageous recompense for top officers) is itself an artifact of the neoliberal reconceptualization of the corporation. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Milgrom law-merchant institutional work and to earlier chapters on the MPS thought collective trajectory. — connects to: Neoliberalism abolishes classes, the individual, and Lockean property in one move — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 164; Neoliberalism reversed classical liberalism’s suspicion of monopoly and corporate power. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2133; Neoliberal corporate theory was deployed to defend Too Big to Bail banks — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 176 (+19 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism reversed classical liberalism’s suspicion of monopoly and corporate power. #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2133