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Coming to Terms with Neoliberalism About Dieter

Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen & Gisela Neunhoffer, eds,
Neoliberal Hegemony: a Global Critique (London,
Routledge, 2006)--- Either ISSN or Journal title must
be supplied. David Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2005).

Philip Mirowski

European Journal of Sociology / Volume 47 / Issue 03 / December 2006, pp 461 - 463

DOI: 10.1017/S0003975606000221, Published online: 24 May 2007

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003975606000221

How to cite this article:

Philip Mirowski (2006). European Journal of Sociology, 47, pp 461-463 doi:10.1017/
S0003975606000221

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     *

T             not so long ago when right-wing political

theory was dismissed out of hand by opponents with a sneer that no serious
intellectual could believe such rubbish. A quarter-century of unprecedented
ascent from one success to another by neoliberals has put a stop to that; the
two volumes here examined are harbingers of a more sophisticated set of
responses. They are connected by both being prompted by a December 
conference in Berlin (although David Harvey barely acknowledges this);
they are both indicative of the willingness of social scientists of Marxist
backgrounds to rethink the confluence of vectors that have rendered what
they consider to be the most significant branch of the conservative
counter-revolution an effective intellectual and political force.
The quandary both books confront is that, both by inclination and by
force of evidence, they concede it would be a mistake to treat the pheno-
menon of Neoliberalism through a purely internalist history of ideas, but
equally in error to treat it as a simple function of material economic condi-
tions, either. This is compounded by the problem that, as Plehwe and Wal-
pen put it, Neoliberalism is not monolithic, but a changing transnational
constellation of doctrines and practices ranging over the course of the
second half of the th century. An appreciation for its contingency and
multivalence is a trusty protopaedeutic against the rampant paranoia that
often besets work on this topic. Because the ‘‘Hegemony’’ volume is a col-
lection of papers, it deals with these problems somewhat more effectively
than does the ‘‘Brief History’’, but unfortunately, neither has fully solved the
conundrum. Harvey mostly avoids it by spending very little effort on the
intellectual side of the movement, and devotes the majority of his efforts to a
survey of events from Reagan and Thatcher to Clinton and Blair, from New
York to the IMF and World Bank, thence from Mexico to South Korea and
Sweden. His chapter on China as the new Neoliberal success story is possi-
bly the best thing in the volume, mainly because it uncovers evidence which
is harder to find elsewhere. The book ends with the usual litany of com-
plaints of the anti-globalization movement: worsened inequality, the com-
modification of everything in sight, and environmental degradation. A stu-
dent seeking some guidance on what Neoliberalism has meant in theory
would nevertheless be left high and dry by the book; she would recognize,
however, the rather outdated proposition that, whatever it was, it was a direct
expression of the class power of a handful of actors.
The Plehwe volume gives a better sense of the differing schools of
thought about Neoliberalism than one finds in departments of politics and

* About Dieter P, Bernhard W & Gisela N, eds, Neoliberal Hegemony: a
Global Critique (London, Routledge, ); and David H, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, ).


Philip M, Carl Koch Professor of Economics and History/Philosophy of
Science [pmirowsk@nd.edu].
Arch.europ.sociol., XLVII,  (), pp. -—-//-$.per art + $. per page©
A.E.S.
 

international relations and sociology; it also attempts to strike a balance

between ‘‘institutional’’ analysis ¢ Mont Pelerin, the World Economic
Forum, the Meltzer Commission on the ‘‘reform’’ of the IMF ¢ and natio-
nal case studies (the chapter on Poland by Dorothy Bohle and Gisela
Neunhoffer is especially interesting) and something approaching history of
ideas, in chapters by Richard Hull on Viennese roots and Peter Muhlbauer
on Neoliberalism in science fiction. From the latter I learned that Ayn
Rand’s Fountainhead () was one of the earliest texts arguing for a
strengthening of intellectual property, a clear divergence from classical
liberal politics, and now of course one of the guiding themes of current
neoliberal dogma. However, one still comes away from the volume with the
impression that some of the contributors were not all that clear in their own
minds about the key attributes of Neoliberal thought. The best short sum-
mary statement is provided by the editors, who plausibly claim that one very
sensible way to confine the phenomenon to manageable proportions is to link
both intellectual and institutional history through the members of Mont
Pelerin, thus acknowledging the crucial role of Friedrich Hayek in the post-
war construction of neoliberal doctrine, and yet equally admitting that the
movement could not be reduced to the ideas of any single person, but was
instead a volatile combination of quasi-independent strains: Chicago
School, German Ordoliberalism, Austrian political economy, Christian
Neoliberalism, and so forth. To use Mont Pelerin as the litmus test also
makes the critical point that the Neoliberal project itself embodied a specific
vision about how one ought to go about integrating the intellectual and
activist aspects of a political movement: Mont Pelerin at the center, a closed
blue sky debating society where utopian schemes could be argued out
without much public scrutiny; a next ring of think tanks and academic
departments (like Chicago) which would publicly translate those discussions
into targeted empirical and theoretical exercises; a third ring of activist think
tanks (like Heritage or the Bertelsmann Foundation) and corporate repre-
sentatives charged with translating the work of the inner rings into timely
interventions in local political controversies. As Plehwe and Walpen
demonstrate, this dictated that the movement possess a transnational cha-
racter from the very beginning ¢ something the Left has yet to learn. Hence
the problem of integration of intellectual activity with institutional inter-
vention was itself something which the Neoliberals set out to tackle, and
thus understanding it requires a different kind of account than that
conventionally divvied up between academic disciplines.
What seems to be missing from both books is a better appreciation for the
nuances of the interplay of Neoliberalism and the economics profession.
Harvey (p. ) simply conflates Neoliberalism with neoclassical economics
¢ a serious conceptual and strategic error. Hans Bieling in the ‘‘Hegemony’’
volume warns against this, but then drops the ball in specifying what preci-
sely allows them to diverge. While it is certainly the case that the orthodox
economics profession has become more neoliberal over time, the amount of


  

work needed to convert a th century theory predicated upon the imitation
of mechanics into a st century Weltanschauung predicated upon the market
as ideal information processor was indeed prodigious, requiring a separate
account. Since all agree Neoliberalism reifies ‘‘The Market’’ into an uber-
Social entity, to which all other human phenomena must give way, it would
seem that devoting at least a modicum of attention to the means by which
neoliberals hijacked neoclassical economics would be as central a part of the
story as, say, the ways in which the Chicago Boys allied themselves with
Pinochet in Chile. This narrative would need to be nearly as complex as the
one that acknowledged a history of political divergences within Mont Pele-
rin, since it seems Hayek was not originally in favor of neoclassical econo-
mics. Luckily, many of the participants in the ‘‘Hegemony’’ volume have
continued working on these and other issues, at a series of follow-up meet-
ings at NYU, Paris, and elsewhere. One can only look forward to the day
when a history of Neoliberalism appears, which does full justice to a very
important sequence of events in Western political and intellectual history.

 

