Neoliberalism triumphed through fringe think tanks, not academic economics
Evidence
During this period the neoliberal agenda was instead developed and advanced from new, nonacademic organizations, of which the Institute of Economic Affairs was the first. Except for a brief period in the early 1970s, these institutions found themselves firmly on the fringe of policy and politics. This changed with the election of Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979: what had hitherto been peripheral now became mainstream. British “Keynesian” academics were locked out of policy formation by the new government. They looked on as the government shaped an economic policy inspired by the ideas of monetarist zealots, journalists, and free market ideologues who could broadly be considered “neoliberal” in orientation. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 377
Categorization
- XREF: This institutional pathway — think tank amplification rather than academic capture — connects to the reader’s material on how network ideas resurface in policy (IEA as private law merchant analogy to the earlier Milgrom reading list). — connects to: Neoclassical economists are the zombies, not the neoliberals themselves; Think tanks attached economists’ names to position papers they did not endorse — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 671; The economics prize consciously moved the profession in a neoliberal direction — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 484 (+8 more)
- SEED: Article angle: the IEA as a case study in how policy revolutions are made from the fringe through nonacademic institutions rather than through shifting disciplinary consensus.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 377
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism triumphed through political arguments against redistribution, not market-efficiency claims
#corroborates(0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 437