Neoliberals adopted Mannheim’s elitist sociology of knowledge while denouncing it.
Evidence
Mannheim represented one of the most potent intellectual adversaries of early neoliberals because he advertised planning not as a rejection of liberalism but as its most advanced stage, in line with scientific modernity. … From Hayek’s intention to found the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed group of like-minded individuals to his 1949 article on “Intellectuals and Socialism,” neoliberals embraced a sociology of knowledge at the service of their ideological project. What Hayek identified as the hubris of the sociologist would ironically be the position he aimed at occupying with the Mont Pèlerin Society. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 89
Categorization
- XREF: Directly fractures the caricature that neoliberals were naive free-market believers — they deliberately built an elite knowledge-diffusion apparatus, a point central to the reader’s austerity study. — connects to: Karl Mannheim shifted from emancipatory sociology to elitist planning for freedom — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 86; Neoliberals rejected the sociology of knowledge as hostile to scientific objectivity — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 87; Hayek saw Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as a dangerous form of scientism. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 88
- SEED: Could be developed into an essay on how movements with ‘anti-elitist’ rhetoric secretly embrace elite knowledge management as a deliberate strategy.
- DEEPTHINKING: The irony that Hayek’s critique of scientific-planning hubris became the very template for the Mont Pèlerin Society’s organizing is a dense, paradigm-complicating point about ideology and epistemology.
Broader Connections
- Neoliberals rejected the sociology of knowledge as hostile to scientific objectivity
#expands(0.95) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 87 - Hayek saw Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge as a dangerous form of scientism.
#exemplifies(0.90) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 88