Neoliberals conceded that liberalism itself is a socially constructed ideology rather than pure science

Evidence

To rescue a “liberal science” meant wresting the authority of science away from these competing projects. The polemical use of “scientism” and its analogues served precisely this purpose. This came at the cost of acknowledging that liberalism was itself an ideology, that is, a conventional doctrine that is socially constructed and not the logical output of abstract reason. As such, they effectively contended, there is no intrinsic relationship between objective science and a specific social philosophy. Neoliberals and social engineers alike fully embraced the scientific modernism of the twentieth century, wherein scientific arguments provided the ultimate source of authority to arbitrate political and social questions. Moreover, neoliberals and their opponents both sought to capitalize on that authority in order to make their discourse more persuasive. Like the “men of science” or the engineers they criticized, both groups believed in science as a way to gain truth and a mastery of social phenomena. Nevertheless, between pure and applied science lay the neoliberal gap: a refusal to harness the progress of knowledge to social expediency. Neoliberals believed an elective affinity endured between the rigors and complexity of economic science, the dispersed and tacit state of social knowledge, and a restrained liberal doctrine. Neoliberals alone embraced the fact that ideology and science ultimately shared the same conventional framework, whereby axiomatic rules had to be trusted by their participants to bring about optimal yet uncertain results. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 85

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of the science/ideology distinction in neoliberal self-understanding — conceding their own doctrine is conventional, not derived from objective science — is dense and genuinely reparadigmatic for how we frame the movement.
• XREF: Connects to Mirowski’s broader argument about neoliberal epistemology and the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ self-understanding. — connects to: Neoliberalism evolved by sloughing off earlier liberal doctrines without acknowledging reversals — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 143; Interwar neoliberals broke with laissez-faire empiricism to build a conventionalist science of liberalism — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 52