Philip Mirowski - The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective

THE ROAD FROM MONT PLERIN

THE ROAD FROM MONT PLERIN

The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective

WITH A NEW PREFACE

EDITED BY
Philip Mirowski
Dieter Plehwe

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

Copyright 2009, 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-0-674-49513-5 (EPUB)

The Library of Congress has catalogued the print edition of this book as follows:

The road from Mont Plerin : the making of the neoliberal thought collective / edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-674-08834-4 (pbk)

1. Neoliberalism. 2. NeoliberalismCase studies. I. Mirowski, Philip, 1951 II. Plehwe, Dieter.

JC574.R63 2009

320.51dc22 2008039929

Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe

Dieter Plehwe

Franois Denord

Keith Tribe

Ralf Ptak

Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski

Yves Steiner

Rob Van Horn

Dieter Plehwe

Kim Phillips-Fein

Karin Fischer

Jennifer Bair

Timothy Mitchell

Philip Mirowski

Six years have passed since the original publication of The Road from Mont Plerin, and it seems the volume has traveled far and wide across a variety of academic contexts that structure a major part of the study of neoliberal ideas, networks, and institutions. A remarkable number of disciplines, notably modern intellectual history, history of economic thought, political science, cultural studies, sociology, and geography, have featured the work in their discussions, albeit with some reservations: Historians of ideas still prefer individual authors and books over social and conceptual history; sociologists seem to consider other social formations more important than institutionalized neoliberal networks when it comes to their relevance to political change; historians of economics cant let go of their obsessions with Hayek and Friedman; while social geographers foster a keen curiosity for the local Monts, which can come at the expense of interest in the larger community of Plerins. Economists have pretended the book doesnt exist because, at this late date, they still dont know how neoliberal most of them are. Regardless, it has been a great pleasure for us to read subsequent work about additional American aspects of the Mont Plerin networks (Burgin 2012), about the linkages between Mont Plerin intellectuals and other British neoliberals (Jones 2012), about explanations for the resilience of neoliberalism beyond the Mont Plerin networks ( Schmidt and Thatcher 2013; Cahill 2014), about the heritage of political theory that animates specific neoliberals (Davies 2013; Vatter 2014), about the various scales, spatial and social dimensions of struggles (Peck 2012); not to mention the scholarly introspection of the Mont Pelrin history written by Philip Plickert (2008), who countered Bernhard Walpens (2004) critical history of intellectual, political, and corporate dimensions of the Mont Plerin project. Both Walpens and Plickerts MPS histories are truly comprehensive monographs, complementary indeed and rich in archival sources, yet still not translated from the German, unfortunately. Access to truly wide-ranging histories of neoliberalism and neoliberals therefore remains an endemic language problem in the anglophile university universe.

Each of the books mentioned above is useful, nevertheless, to a broader understanding of the neoliberal transformations of capitalism we also had hoped to address. Alas, only one person concerned with Mont Plerin studies, Philip Plickert, comes close to our transnational thought collective even if he objects to hegemony theory. Unlike Angus Burgins efforts to Americanize and individualize transnational Mont Plerin history, Plickert keeps the neo of neoliberalism firmly in focus: the organized effort to think at some distance from both traditional laissez-faire and collectivism or socialism. The viability of the neoliberal task required constant attention due to challenges resulting from pragmatism, propaganda needs, or competing norms. Plickert (2008, 462) alerts his readers to the strategic dimensions of the neoliberal intellectual program from the Colloque Walter Lippmann onward, to the different wings struggling within the project, and, significantly, to the eventual founding of the competing Property and Freedom Society in 2006, modeled after the Mont Plerin Society.

Clarity about the boundaries and limits of neoliberalism is required to improve ongoing research: Neoliberals competed with the other new liberals (and more radical forces both on the left and on the right) for political and cultural clout, backed by expertisethe new currency of technocratic democracy. It was no longer the tired binary of state vs. market for them, but rather, the ways in which they were thought to be necessarily intertwined. Neoliberals share with Hegel and Gramsci a concern for the expanded state, or civil society, at least with regard to the maintenance of order. What may look like a compromise with socialism to the atavistic liberal right wing really is a fundamental insight that neoliberals share with social liberals: There is no such thing as a stable free market or pristine capitalism. But whereas social liberals consider social and economic inequality the devil of capitalism, neoliberals believe in the need to achieve greater stability under conditions of capitalism and inequality. If social liberals can be uncertain about the (mixed) economy they really would like, neoliberals have no fundamental doubts about the capitalist market. The resulting focused notion of conservative reform is the ultimate strength, not the weakness, of neoliberalism in the face of competition from social liberals who in the meantime seem to have lost faith, commitment, energy, and stamina.

The Road from Mont Plerin may have inadvertently contributed to some of the confusion surrounding the core subject by emphasizing areas of ambiguity, neoliberal pluralism, and historical diversity of actually existing neoliberalism. Yet our effort to get away from cookie-cutter models of neoliberalism was decidedly not an invitation to think of neoliberalism as utterly amorphous. Instead we believedand continue to believethat it is necessary to approach collectively the challenge posed by Mont Plerin and complementary networks of neoliberal intellectuals. Some warn against our use of Ludwig Flecks and Karl Mannheims notion of a thought collective to deal with neoliberals as a unit, although this was mostly a device to circumvent the widespread tendency to lose sight of the wood for the trees. Although we do not usually gravitate to the center, we consider it truly important to walk the fine line between exceedingly diffuse and monolithic, oversimplified identities of neoliberalism. Much commentary over the last six years seems to waver between these bipolar options. Transnational historical social network analysis of individuals, organizations, and ideas can serve as a prophylactic against thinking of ideas in splendid isolation, divorcing them from linkages to politics and business (as Plickert 2008 does unconvincingly, and Burgin 2012 does intermittently). To suggest an analogy: Would a consideration of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin be adequate to understand the entire history of communism, through sole reading of Capital or What Is to Be Done? Worse, what would it mean to jump directly to a description of the organization of industry and agriculture in the Soviet Union or Cuba, because not much else would be needed to understand the intellectual history of Marxism? We have a hunch that many people still do not regard neoliberalism as a serious theoretical endeavor, for otherwise, why do so many act as though reading