Neoliberals pursued an engineered order rather than expecting free markets to emerge naturally

Evidence

To Friedrich Hayek and his fellow neoliberals, the individualist and none-galitarian society that neoliberalism envisaged was not a natural condition. They did not expect it to emerge spontaneously once the powers of the state were reduced, as nineteenth-century liberals had believed. The neoliberal order was an economic and social project to be built by capturing and reorganizing political power. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1907

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses classical laissez-faire assumptions; connects to Mirowski’s argument that the Mont Pèlerin network saw markets as constructs requiring state intervention. — connects to: Neoliberalism’s founders believed ideological change demanded deliberate collective organization — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 218; Markets can be performatively constructed by agents who are not atomistic homo economicus — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 25; Neoliberals abandoned economic measurement for institutional design after the 1930s — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 76 (+36 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals marketed the market as natural by borrowing early evolutionary science metaphors #contradicts (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2127