Scholars dispute whether ideas or class interest explain neoliberalism’s internal cohesion
Evidence
It is reasonable to wonder what could have held neoliberalism together under the centrifugal forces threatening to fragment it into factionalism. David Harvey propounds the Marxist position that it is straightforwardly a class project masked by various versions of “free market” rhetoric. For him, the ideas are far less significant than the brute function of serving the interests of finance capital and globalized elites in the redistribution of wealth upward. Michael Howard and James King proffer what they term an historical materialist reading, fairly similar to Harvey, one that “stresses the importance of the contradictions inherent in the institutions prevalent in the postwar era, and the crises these contradictions spawned in the 1970s.” Daniel Stedman Jones divides neoliberalism into three phases characterized by dominant political practices: the prehistory up to the first meeting of Mont Pèlerin, a second phase up to the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher consisting of a monetarist critique of neo-Keynesianism, and a modern phase since the 1980s. Jamie Peck gives greater weight to ideas, suggesting that the fragmentation is real, but still offset by a shared commitment to an unattainable utopian notion of freedom. Nevertheless, he credits success in infiltrating the state as permitting wide latitude in divergent component theories: “Only with the capture of state power could immanent critique become rolling autocritique.” Peter-Wim Zuidhof suggests that the fragmentation is part of a conscious program of rhetoric to empty out any fixed referent for the term “market.” Without denying the force of any of these explanations, there are also a few rather more pedestrian considerations of the actual structure of the MPS and its attendant satellite organizations. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 121
Categorization
- XREF: Surveys the intellectual battleground — Harvey, Peck, Stedman Jones — that any market-critique library already engages; situates Mirowski against them. — connects to: Neoliberalism’s cohesion comes from thought-collective structure, not explicit doctrine — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 916; Theorists explain neoliberalism’s cohesion through class interest, phases, or rhetoric. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 121; Contingency scholars reject theoretical coherence in explaining neoliberal policy (+6 more)
- corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 121
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism’s cohesion comes from thought-collective structure, not explicit doctrine
#responds-to(0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 916 - Theorists explain neoliberalism’s cohesion through class interest, phases, or rhetoric.
#responds-to(0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 121 - Contingency scholars reject theoretical coherence in explaining neoliberal policy
#responds-to(0.80) - A scholarly school explains neoliberalism’s rise as ad hoc contingency without theoretical coherence
#responds-to(0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 204 - Neoliberalism is internally diverse and marked by real internal conflict
#responds-to(0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 45 - Materialist and ideational explanations of neoliberalism’s endurance are complementary, not rival
#responds-to(0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 14 - Neoliberalism operates from a unified playbook despite surface variation
#responds-to(0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 917 - Ordoliberalism’s internal contradictions combined economic modernity with antimodern social ideas
#exemplifies(0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 506