Neoliberals invoked Carl Schmitt’s sovereignty doctrine to justify backing the Chilean coup

Evidence

One notorious incarnation of the neoliberal double truth doctrine was the participation of numerous MPS members and affiliates in the coup that toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Milton Friedman spends a good chunk of his autobiography attempting to excuse and explain his actions away; afterward Hayek was also pilloried for his role. It was all just an unfortunate set of exceptional events, they intoned; it was not our fault. But Carl Schmitt taught that sovereignty is defined as the ability to determine the exceptions to the rule of law: “Sovereign is he who decides the state of emergency”; deploying the double truth doctrine in Chile showed that the neoliberals had arrogated sovereignty to themselves. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2149

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Schmitt’s sovereignty-as-exception concept to the Chilean coup and neoliberal double truth doctrine—resonates with broader literature on neoliberalism’s authoritarian underbelly. — connects to: Early neoliberalism crystallized partly in intellectual dialogue with Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberalism — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 358; Neoliberals needed Chile’s dictatorship to find the means to depoliticize economies. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 301; Naomi Klein identified Carl Schmitt’s sovereign-emergency doctrine as a core neoliberal tenet — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2157 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that invoking the ‘exception’ is itself a sovereign act, and that neoliberals thereby arrogated sovereignty, is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly did Friedman and Hayek narrate their own exoneration in their autobiographies?

Broader Connections

• Naomi Klein identified Carl Schmitt’s sovereign-emergency doctrine as a core neoliberal tenet #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2157
• Dictatorship solved the neoliberal problem of replacing popular sovereignty with market sovereignty #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 330
• Neoliberalism’s double-truth doctrine originated in Hayek’s covert borrowing from Schmitt #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 239