Neoliberals rejected planning yet immediately designed world-scale institutional blueprints.
Evidence
In 1937 Walter Lippmann wrote that “the Good Society has no architectural design. There are no blueprints.” He leaned heavily on the work of Mises and Hayek, who had written two years earlier that “we are not intellectually equipped to improve the working of our economic system by ‘planning.’ ” Ironically, the response of the neoliberals to this insight was to immediately begin creating designs, blueprints, and plans, not at the scale of the nation but at the scale of the region and the world. The federation plans of Hayek, Robbins, and Mises were designed as prophylaxis—using institutions to suppress the emergence of special interest demands by design. One of the most critical special interests to suppress was the nation itself. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 398
Categorization
- QUESTION: The contradiction — anti-planning rhetoric alongside enthusiastic blueprinting — invites deeper exploration of how the two were reconciled theoretically.
- XREF: This irony parallels the broader tension in neoliberalism between anti-intervention rhetoric and active state-building, relevant to the reader’s austerity/neoliberalism thread. — connects to: Early neoliberals rejected laissez-faire and wanted strong state action; Neoliberal critique deployed a two-pronged argument against planning — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1367; Early neoliberalism rejected laissez-faire in favor of a state-built competitive order. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 365 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Early neoliberals rejected laissez-faire and wanted strong state action
#corroborates(0.80) - Neoliberalism rejects laissez-faire in favor of perpetual constructionist state intervention
#corroborates(0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 148 - Neoliberals pursued an engineered order rather than expecting free markets to emerge naturally
#corroborates(0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1907 - Neoliberals abandoned economic measurement for institutional design after the 1930s
#corroborates(0.78) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 76 - Neoliberal critique deployed a two-pronged argument against planning
#complicates(0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1367 - Early neoliberalism rejected laissez-faire in favor of a state-built competitive order.
#corroborates(0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 365 - Neoliberals attacked planning as epistemically impossible, not merely undesirable.
#corroborates(0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 84 - Neoliberals opposed colonial state planning as a politicisation of the economy
#contradicts(0.70) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 240