Neoliberals deliberately combined elite scholarship with populist simplification

Evidence

The perception of a need to maintain a radical stance with regard to fundamental change in the long term, rather than opportunistically subscribing to feasible change in the short term, led neoliberals to combine elite scholarship with popular writing and intermittent sophistication with populist simplification. … Upon closer inspection, one can easily detect the neoliberal technologies for the creation of international reputation, including academic honors provided by neoliberal universities such as Marroquin University in Guatemala (Ayau 1990), the Milton Friedman Prize of the Cato Institute, or the Antony Fisher Prize for think tanks. The international reputation of leading members of the neoliberal thought collective has worked wonders in local fund-raising efforts to establish or expand think tanks and other organizations (Goodman and Marotz-Baden 1990; Frost 2002). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 87

Categorization

• XREF: The radical-vs-opportunistic stance pairing parallels the ‘building on’ link about communication technology shaping culture through broad symbols — same mechanism of reaching wide audiences. — connects to: Regressive populism and speculative finance are forming new alliances. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 57; Neoliberal authors produce obfuscating scholarship that disguises the movement’s own practices — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1821; Neoliberals deliberately bypassed universities in favor of a closed, hand-picked elite society. (+4 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 87

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism rests on a double truth separating elite doctrine from mass propaganda #expands (0.92) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2146
• Neoliberal governance reshapes scholarship to serve economic usefulness #expands (0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 626