Neoliberalism is fundamentally an epistemological project, not merely a political or economic one

Evidence

For someone who has just spent a few hundred pages arguing that the economics profession has been proven hopelessly corrupt by virtue of its behavior during the crisis, and that the Neoliberal Thought Collective has managed to weather the crisis by expanding to fill the entire space of political discourse left void by the dereliction of the economists, I am now going to do something a little counterintuitive: I am going to start by agreeing (in a limited way) with one famous Mont Pèlerin member, Hernando de Soto. In a retrospective on the crisis, he insisted, “the recession wasn’t about bubbles but about the organization of knowledge.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 900

Categorization

• DEFINE: Inverts a core anti-austerity assumption by noting the Mont Pèlerin member’s epistemic reading of the crisis is worth taking seriously.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘thought collective’ project — the NTC’s epistemic self-understanding across chapters. — connects to: Neoliberalism was both a class-power project and a coherent ideology. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 478; Neoliberalism is a normative mode of reason, not merely an economic policy set — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 80; Neoliberalism’s social theory is fundamentally epistemological, recoding freedom as instrumental to independent orders (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism is a normative mode of reason, not merely an economic policy set #corroborates (0.92) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 80
• Neoliberalism governs as a normative form of reason, not ideology or material force. #corroborates (0.88) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 219
• Neoliberalism’s social theory is fundamentally epistemological, recoding freedom as instrumental to independent orders #expands (0.85)
• Neoliberalism reframed politics as an epistemological question of what can be known #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 54
• Neoliberal epistemology drew on Poincaré’s conventionalism to attack socialist rationalism #exemplifies (0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 62
• Neoliberalism is a governing rationality, not just economic policy or ideology. #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 14