Early Neoliberalism Research Articles

Framing the Market: The Unexpected Commonalities between Karl Polanyi and the Ordoliberals

Abstract There has been a resurgence in scholarship on Karl Polanyi in recent years, against the backdrop of rising populism and critiques of globalization and financialization. In these works, Polanyi is typically portrayed as critic of the contested notion of ‘neoliberalism’. In this paper I demonstrate that, to the contrary, Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944) shares many of the themes central to the contributions of the early neoliberals, specifically the ordoliberal thinkers. Polanyi and the ordoliberals did not only seek to analyze the origins of the same social crisis of the 1930 s and 40 s, but their analysis of the deficiencies of nineteenth-century liberalism as well as the subsequent disintegration through rapidly growing interventions in favor of powerful groups in society has much in common. This paper explores these similarities and demonstrates that they also extended to the way they perceived the responsibility of scientists as well as the interdependence of the various orders in society. It is argued that the ordoliberals, their fellow-traveler F. A. Hayek and Karl Polanyi all perceived the interdependence between the state, civil society and the market somewhat differently, but agreed on the need to conceptualize the relationship between the three. Finally, it is suggested that even the normative ideal of Karl Polanyi, the realization of ‘freedom in a complex society’, has important commonalities with the ordoliberal program: the protection of individual freedom from concentrated forms of power in society.

DUAL ARGUMENT, DOUBLE TRUTH: ON THE CONTINUED IMPORTANCE OF THE STATE IN NEOLIBERAL THOUGHT

It has been established that the neoliberal creed arising in the interwar and early postwar years, despite its strong rejection of economic planning, also entailed a rejection of laissez-faire liberalism. This article argues that recent attempts at construing early neoliberalism as thus being a more nuanced or moderate creed than later iterations are nonetheless flawed. The “dual argument” of early neoliberalism indicated a new approach to market liberalism in which the state was not seen as the market’s opposite but rather its precondition. This important move is obscured by the language of moderation and nuance. In place of “the radicalization thesis,” the second part of the article considers Philip Mirowski’s concept of a “double-truth doctrine” and argues that an appreciation of the state for social and economic governance is a common feature of different neoliberalisms, which nonetheless differ in their preferred policy suggestions for the use of state power.

Neoliberal imperialism

This essay approaches the neoliberal tradition of thought through the lens of liberal imperialism. Seeking to bring scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas together with research on liberal defences of empire, I show that the neoliberal tradition of thought contains a number of formal, explicit, and systematic defences of (European) colonialism. In the first section of the essay, I contextualise neoliberal imperialism by showing that many prominent early neoliberals had close ties to the British Colonial Office. I then offer a close reading of two highly influential instances of the neoliberal defence of empire. The first was articulated between the 1930s and 1940s by Herbert Frankel, who saw colonisation as a form of civilisational improvement that places a heavy ethical and political burden on the coloniser. The second was articulated by Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan between the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to Frankel’s civilisational justification of colonialism, Gann and Duignan articulated a more dispassionate cost-benefit argument, claiming that colonialism’s advantages outweigh its disadvantages. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this shift from a civilisational to a consequentialist frame both for the neoliberal tradition and for liberal imperialist discourse at large.

The Politics of Rationality in Early Neoliberalism: Max Weber, Ludwig von Mises, and the Socialist Calculation Debate.

Initiated by Mises and popularized by Hayek, the socialist calculation debate staked a political position on a methodological axiom: the "irrationality" of state planning. This article argues that Weber's typology of "formal" vs. "substantive" rationality at once drew from Austrian School marginalism and helped frame Mises and Hayek's critiques in the calculation debate. In turn, this debate shaped an anti-socialist front among the early neoliberals before their vaunted gatherings in Paris and Mont Pèlerin. Through social scientific interventions, early neoliberalism split economics (qua market rationality) from politics (qua social justice) so as to place the latter beyond the epistemological pale.

Neoliberalism Incorporated: Early Neoliberal Involvement in the Postwar Reconstruction: The Case Study of the Netherlands (1945–1958)

Although recent studies have extensively traced the development of neoliberal ideas in international think-tanks since the late 1930s, scholars of early neoliberalism have paid far less attention to the translation of these ideas into policy. Current scholarship predominantly identifies the introduction of neoliberal policies with a paradigm shift among policymakers in the late 1970s and depicts the early neoliberal movement as an idea-centred and isolated phenomenon that was unable to put its ideas into practice. This article argues instead that early neoliberals employed an idea-centred approach to politics to establish a coalition of like-minded academics, journalists, politicians and policy officials. Focusing on the Netherlands, it demonstrates how this strategy brought neoliberals press coverage, influence within the Christian democratic parliamentary parties and acknowledgement among professional economists. On the one hand, their struggle to exert influence over policy matters contributed to the implementation of pro-market industrialization policies, which, ironically, were pursued by a coalition of social democrats and Christian democrats. On the other hand, it also compelled them to include Christian-democratic views in their political agenda, leading to a corporatist-neoliberal policy synthesis whose features exhibit remarkable similarities to German ‘ordoliberal’ ideas.

Epistemological Battles on the Home Front: Early Neoliberals at War against the Social Relations of Science Movement.

During the Second World War, fighting the growing influence of left-leaning British scientists became the focal point of the publications of Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and Michael Polanyi. Doing so, they elaborated key epistemological principles of neoliberalism: the indeterminate nature of knowledge, the shortcomings of holistic and determinist theories of society, and the spontaneous aspects of human organizations. Although at odds on the ideological spectrum, they shared with their adversaries the idea that the production of knowledge depended on economic and social conditions. Their view of what science and scientists should do informed the birth of the Mont-Pèlerin Society.

Ulighed for alle - Ulighedspersepktiver i neoliberalismen fra 1930'erne til i dag

By exploring the ways in which inequality has been represented in neoliberal ideology and how neoliberal views of inequality have changed, this article illuminates some essential discrepancies and contradictory beliefs in the neoliberal thought collective. The paper argues that the views of inequality underwent fundamental changes from the early neoliberals of the interwar period to the later neoliberals of the post-War era. These changes are in part understood by different conceptions of liberty, the relation between the state and the market, and beliefs about the public interest. The early neoliberals problematized the relation between inequality andpower, which they saw as a potential threat to the credibility of the fundamental freedom rights upholding the democratic society. This changed with the late neoli-berals, for whom inequality became a value in itself, connected to liberal notions of competition, diversity, and progress. Inequality was now to be celebrated, repre-sented, and measured as a sign of the free society and the well-functioning market.

Tidlig neoliberalisme

This article maps the early conceptual and institutional history of neoliberalism, arguing that the social question was of vital importance to the ideology’s early de-velopment in the 1930s. This has been overlooked in recent intellectual histories of neoliberalism, which focus primarily on the post-war period. Those who have ventured into the prehistory of neoliberalism have primarily focused on the neoliberal acceptance of stronger state intervention in the economy, but without contextualizing this shift against the background of the social question. In addition, the article explores another overlooked dimension of early neoliberalism, namely the transnational institutional efforts that were indispensable to the foundation of the neoliberal network.

On Strike: Student Activism, CUNY, and Engaged Anthropology

AbstractThis is an autoethnographic account of the 1991 City University of New York (CUNY) strike movement. The authors were some of the key organizers of the strike. Student mobilizations were not narrowly framed to oppose tuition hikes but conceptualized as resistance against austerity measures and the expanding war economy. This article reflects on the intersection of political activism and anthropology through the lens of our experience in the strike, the historical moment of early neoliberalism, the specificity of CUNY, and how our experience shaped our ongoing engagement as anthropologists.

Fragile Knowledge, Moral Pitfalls: Early Neoliberalism and Its Demise

This article proposes an interpretation of the intellectual origins of neoliberalism. Influenced by scientific modernism, its founders held that knowledge, being indeterminate and uncertain, was fragile. They feared that the authority of science could be corrupted and made to serve political aims opposed to liberal values. As a result, early neoliberals endeavored to rebuild the principles of liberalism from a moral-epistemological position. They put forward a moral and legal framework that could stabilize the market economy and embed liberal values in the process of science. Later neoliberals, however, set forth a more instrumental vision of morality and knowledge that unraveled the early neoliberal project.

Navigating world order: neoliberalism between nationalism and cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT Through a morphological analysis of early neoliberal discourse, it is argued that preserving the system of states became integral to neoliberalism after a period of contestation. It is common knowledge that the early neoliberals thought of economic nationalism as an archaic practice. But it is less well known that they also learned to dread institutional cosmopolitanism. The first cohort of neoliberal theorists, despite displaying cosmopolitan propensities economically and morally, decided during the 1940s to abandon the cosmopolitan political principles that several early institutional designs had followed. The neoliberals realized that nationalism had an upside. Their reasoning was pragmatic rather than democratic. A cosmopolitan world order, with a central democratic decision-making body – such as a world government answerable to a world parliament elected by the world populace – would more likely than not be anathema to their primary project; creating a world economy for entrepreneurs. Hence, they finally embraced borders.

The quiet failures of early neoliberalism: From rational expectations to Keynesianism in reverse

AbstractWhile the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to ‘fail forwards’ by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects – and in legitimising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success.

Review of Ola Innset’s Reinventing Liberalism. The Politics, Philosophy and Economics of Early Neoliberalism (1920–1947). Cham: Springer, 2020, 207 pp.

Review of Ola Innset’s Reinventing Liberalism. The Politics, Philosophy and Economics of Early Neoliberalism (1920–1947). Cham: Springer, 2020, 207 pp.

Calculation and Conflict

Today, it is often forgotten that the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s was not only about whether market societies were more economically efficient than planned ones; more crucially, Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Friedrich Hayek depicted economic planning as a threat to the moral and political order of “Western civilization.” A planned economy, these early neoliberals argued, would override the “democracy of consumers” through which individuals registered their own preferences on the market and threaten individual freedom and social peace. This article argues that early neoliberal thinkers mobilized a racialized argument against economic planning, which they depicted as a threat from “the East” and a regression to a “primitive” pre-capitalist, egalitarian morality. Against this neoliberal argument, I retrieve the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath’s argument that a capitalist market economy is inherently violent and requires the suppression of non-market forms of life.

Crisis and continuity: Robert Marjolin, transnational policy-making and neoliberalism, 1930s–70s

ABSTRACT In this article, the author follows a history of transnational policy-making to illustrate a perspective on the crisis of the ‘long 1970s’ that is often neglected: continuity of transnational actors and institutions since the 1930s. In the interwar period early global governance practices consolidated, concerned with questions of global order and the kind of normative statehood needed to sustain it. Neoliberalism emerged at this time and in this field of early global governance actors. The concept of early neoliberalism is established in the article and taken as a red thread to think about European integration’s early history from a transnational perspective. Further, Robert Marjolin’s multi-level agency, his role in early neoliberalism and his thought serve as a prism through which the long 1970s from the financial troubles of the late 1960s to the new language of market optimism of the early 1980s are put into perspective vis-à-vis the continuity of actors and institutions managing the crisis. It is argued that the Left’s relationship with neoliberalism needs more careful attention and that Marjolin acted in accordance with some early neoliberal principles since the 1930s before, rather grudgingly, participating in the shaping of a new, contemporary neoliberal paradigm.

Globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism

Quinn Slobodian's intellectual history of neo-liberalism is a welcome addition to scholarship on global governance. Slobodian traces the rise of neo-liberalism from an obscure philosophy to a global movement that laid the foundations of the European Union. An intellectual tour de force, the book covers the period from the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire to the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protests. Slobodian argues that early neo-liberals owed much debt to Carl Schmitt. They conceived of the world as divided between two realms. The world of imperium was the world organized politically into states, while that of dominium was organized economically by rules of property rights. But turning Schmitt's preoccupation with political power on its head, early neo-liberals believed that the political should be subordinate to the economic, and state power should be used to secure the smooth functioning of the market. Contrary to how neo-liberalism is usually portrayed, the original thinkers in the tradition were not against state intervention per se. They were against interventions that would violate market rules, but not against the state crushing labour or implementing laws to protect property rights.

Justificatory Fables of Ordoliberalism: Laissez-faire and the “Third Way”

This article critically examines two conceptualisations of ordoliberalism. In one, it is defined, together with neoliberalism, against 19th-century liberalism (in its social liberal and laissez-faire variants). This reading was common among ordoliberals themselves, and early neoliberals such as Friedrich von Hayek, as well as among critics, notably Michel Foucault. In another, ordoliberalism is contrasted to neoliberalism, with the latter presumed to be a species of laissez-faire economics. This reading is commonly accompanied by the supposition that ordoliberalism represents a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism, or between laissez-faire liberalism and state planning. The main body of this contribution presents a critical analysis of both positions, by way of analysis of ordoliberal texts and a history of the discourse of laissez-faire.

Towards the Centre: Early Neoliberals in the Netherlands and the Rise of the Welfare State, 1945–1958

Although scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the history of neoliberalism, the ‘breakthrough’ of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan still captures most of their attention. Consequently, the neoliberal project is primarily taken as Anglo-American, while its early history is mostly studied to explain the political shift of the 1980s. This article focuses on the early neoliberal movement in the Netherlands (1945–58) to highlight the continental European roots of neoliberal thought, trace the remarkably wide dissemination of neoliberal ideas in Dutch socio-economic debates and highlight the key role of these ideas in the conceptualisation of the Western European welfare state.

Michael Polanyi and Early Neoliberalism

Between the late 1930s and the 1950s, Michael Polanyi came in close contact with a diverse cast of intellectuals seeking a renewal of the liberal doctrine. The elaboration of this “neoliberalism” happened through a transnational collaboration between economists, philosophers, and social theorists, united in their rejection of central planning. Defining a common agenda for this “early neoliberalism” offered an opportunity to discard the old laissez-faire doctrine and restore a supervisory role of the state. Ultimately, post-war dissensions regarding the direction of these efforts led Polanyi away from the neoliberal core.

The geographical and ethical origins of neoliberalism: The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the foundations of a new geopolitical order

Observers tend to overlook the early neoliberalism that derived from the “Lippmann Colloquium” organised in Paris in 1938. Analysis of the discourse produced and books published at this founding moment shows that neoliberalism was then presented as a geopolitical doctrine aimed at redressing the spatial fragmentation of the world into States. The means to achieve this, according to this first neoliberalism, was by implementing what, in 1978, M. Foucault called “governmentality”: a multiscalar political system based on the submission of territories to the transnational discipline of a multilateral free division of labour. This thinking was very similar to the convictions of a number of political leaders who, from the 1940s onwards, were involved in creating a new international order uniting Western Europe and the United States, the foundations of which had many similarities with the principles of the first neoliberalism.