I don’t think it has gone unnoticed that the NTC embodies a budget of paradoxes, to put it politely. It starts with the strange behavior we already encountered: the neoliberals had begun acknowledging in the 1930s–’50s that they were in pursuit of something “neo,” only to subsequently deny all divergence from an ancient time-honored “liberalism,” against all evidence to the contrary. Subsequently, the continuity story became the exoteric stance, whereas the “neo” remained an esoteric appreciation. But then the dichotomy expands into all manner of seemingly incompatible positions. As Will Davies has put it: market competition should stand as a guarantor of democracy, but not vice versa; unimpeded economic activity would guarantee political freedom, but not vice versa. Yet, curiously, this did not apply to Mont Pèlerin itself.116
The Neoliberal Thought Collective tamed many of the contending contradictory conceptions of the “good society” documented in this volume by trying to have it both ways: to stridently warn of the perils of expanding purview of state activity while simultaneously imagining the strong state of their liking rendered harmless through some instrumentality of “natural” regulation; to posit their “free market” as an effortless generator and conveyor belt of information while simultaneously strenuously and ruthlessly prosecuting a “war of ideas” on the ground; asserting that their program would lead to unfettered economic growth and enhanced human welfare while simultaneously suggesting that no human mind could ever really know any such thing, and therefore that it was illegitimate to justify their program by its consequences; to portray the market as something natural, yet simultaneously in need of solicitous attention to continually reconstruct it; to portray their version of the market as the ne plus ultra of all human institutions, while simultaneously suggesting that the market is in itself insufficient to attain and nourish transeconomic values of a political, social, religious, and cultural character. “Neoliberal writings on allocation shift back and forth between libertarian and utilitarian vocabularies, with the two sometimes appearing interchangeably within a paper or chapter.”117 This ability to vertiginously pivot between paragraphs should itself be considered a political technology of the NTC.
The proliferation of straddles cannot be chalked up to mere pluralism of voices, inadequate critical attention, or absentmindedness. Few political doctrines have undergone the sustained extent of internal criticism of neoliberalism at Mont Pèlerin. All systems sport a modicum of internal contradictions as they age; but these particular discordances appear to betoken some structural problems within the neoliberal program, which have been dealt with in the recent past through application of the double-truth principle. I opt to cover three such contradictions here, which are arguably central to an understanding of the crisis: (1) that a society dedicated to liberal ideals had to resort to illiberal procedures and practices; (2) that a society that held spontaneous order as the ne plus ultra of human civilization had to submit to heavy regimentation and control; and (3) that a society dedicated to rational discourse about a market conceived as a superior information processor ended up praising and promoting ignorance. These, I trust, are stances so incongruous, such howling lapses of intellectual decorum, that one cannot imagine that the protagonists themselves did not take note of them. The historical record reveals that they did.
1. The illiberalism and hierarchical control of the MPS.
Can a liberal political program be conceived and prosecuted by means of open discussion with all comers? Hayek, with his sophisticated appreciation for the sociology of knowledge, thought it should not right from the very beginnings of Mont Pèlerin. In 1946, as he toured the United States attempting to drum up support for his new society, he explicitly stipulated that he was “using the term Academy in its original sense of a closed society [my emphasis] whose members would be bound together by common convictions and try to both develop this common philosophy and to spread its understanding.”118 This evocation of Plato’s Academy was not harmless, as he doubtless understood; it has been the recourse of other MPS members whenever the closed, secret nature of the society has been raised. Hayek managed to have his way in this regard—from the start, recruitment, participation, and membership in the NTC has always been strictly controlled from within—but this starkly raises the issue of whether the MPS could practice what it nominally preached. This objection was immediately raised in 1947 by one of the more famous members of the collective, Karl Popper.
Popper had just published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945, attacking Plato, Hegel, and Marx; he was already closely allied with Hayek, who would conspire to bring him to the LSE. Popper notoriously had argued that a regime of open criticism and dispute was the only correct path to political progress; this dovetailed with his influential characterization of science as an ongoing process of conjecture and refutation. Significantly, he pressed this objection upon Hayek almost immediately upon receiving his prospectus for the envisioned organization:
I feel that, for such an academy, it would be advantageous, and even necessary, to secure the participation of some people who are known to be socialists or close to socialism . . . My own position, as you will remember, was always to try for a reconciliation of liberals and socialists . . . This does not, of course, mean that the emphasis on the dangers of socialism (dangers to freedom) should be suppressed or lessened. On the contrary . . . It occurred to me that you might ask me for the names of socialists who might be invited; and I must confess I am at a loss.119
As it happens, due either to lack of “suitable” candidates, or to Hayek’s intransigence on this point, no such diversity of opinion was ever permitted to materialize at the MPS meetings. All discussion was kept within a small circle of political enthusiasm, more often than not held together by what they jointly opposed, rather than some shared Utopia. Popper continued to argue at early MPS meetings against the idea that fruitful discussions of politics required prescreening for ideological homogeneity, or as it was delicately put, “common basic assumptions”; but essentially, he was ignored.120 Many other participants, rather, expressed concern that ideological agreement was already not being sufficiently policed; a few, such as Maurice Allais, withdrew due to its perceived dogmatism. As he explained his reservations to Hayek:
The entire issue is to know if the envisioned group wants in the future to coalesce around a rigid dogmatism or if, on the contrary, it wants in its very organization to maintain the principle of liberal thought, of liberal discussion, within the cadre of principles generally accepted by all. Is it a matter of creating a political action group or a society for the defense of private property, or on the contrary, is it a matter of founding a society of thought capable of reexamining without bias all the questions up for debate and of initiating the foundation of a genuine and effective renewal of liberalism?121
Hayek clearly opted for having both simultaneously, but to make it work, there had to be high barriers to entry, and a putsch or two along the way.122 A clash of worldviews on home turf was to be avoided at all costs. For good or for ill, the MPS rapidly evolved into a closed society with a rather stringent ideological litmus test.
This raises the difficult issue of whether the “Open Society” really works the way it was portrayed by Popper, and still sometimes evoked by the NTC when waxing catholic. Many writers have noted in detail how Popper’s vision proved incompatible with that of Hayek; many philosophers of science have rejected Popper’s vision of how science actually works.123 But Popper himself at least glimpsed that his youthful exaltation of tolerance for unlimited criticism was unavailing in many circumstances that resembled those the MPS was constructed to counter. For instance, in a long footnote in Open Society he grants the plausibility of paradoxes of tolerance (“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”) and democracy (“the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule”), but had little to offer concerning how those paradoxes should be defanged. Yet around the same time, Popper was already flirting with the Hayekian “solution
”: membership in the Open Society had to be prescreened to conform to a “minimum philosophy”: but the principles of selection for that philosophy were never made as explicit as they were by Hayek in practice.124
Here, I believe, we can witness the birth of one of the trademark “double truth” doctrines of neoliberalism at the MPS. By professing a continuation of classical liberalism to outsiders, neoliberals lauded a tolerant open society that let all positions have a fair hearing and full empirical test. Hayek’s Road is written in this register, with its dedication, “To socialists of all parties.” Divergent views should compete and be criticized from the opposing camp. Everyone, they said, was welcome to participate. Yet there abided a closed subset of MPS insiders who recognized the force of the paradoxes of tolerance and democracy; and consequently they ran their thought collective as an exclusive hierarchical organization, consisting of members preselected for conformity, which encountered opposed conceptions of the world only in highly caricatured versions produced by their own true believers. Esoteric knowledge was transgressive: a liberalism for the twenty-first century could be incubated and sustained only by an irredeemably illiberal organization. Part of the price of admission was initiation into the double truth of the “minimum philosophy”: insiders could learn to live with this esoteric doctrine after a long period of apprenticeship. Outsiders need never know anything about it, and could persist snug in their belief that liberalism meant the tolerant dialogue of the open society; of course, they need never apply to actually enter the MPS.
2. The MPS as regimented controlled society dedicated to the doctrine of “spontaneous order.”
As in the previous case, the internal MPS membership themselves were first to comment on the incongruity of this situation. As the house historian of the MPS reports, Milton Friedman joked in a letter to Hayek, “Our faith requires that we are skeptical of the efficacy, at least in the short run, of organized efforts to promulgate [MPS doctrines].”125 The problem, quite clearly, was if the neoliberal portrait of market order was so overwhelmingly superior, then why hadn’t it just naturally come to dominate all other economic forms? Why hadn’t it already summoned the spirit of liberalism that would guarantee it to flourish? Who really needed the shock troops of the Neoliberal Thought Collective? Classical liberals had adopted the consistent position either that it already had or would happen inexorably, so just sit back and enjoy the inexorable trend of history. Neoliberals had rejected all that in favor of an activist stance, but then had to face up to the vexatious intellectual lack of consilience between their sneers at the impudence of the will to planning and their own presumption of the utter nobility of their own will to power. In other words, how could they justify the Audacity of Intervention, or as James Buchanan so cagily posed the question by misrepresenting their own program as classically liberal:
The classical liberal, in the role of social engineer, may, of course, recommend institutional laissez faire as a preferred policy stance. But why, and under what conditions, should members of the citizenry, or of some ultimate political decision authority, accept this advice more readily than that proffered by any other social engineer?126
As we have now grown accustomed, there existed more than one engagement with this conundrum within the Neoliberal Thought Collective; however, this fact should be understood as intimately entwined with the double-truth doctrine. Although I expect further research will uncover further variants, I will briefly point to three responses within the MPS.
The first response was that pioneered by Milton Friedman, and, it so happens, James Buchanan. The story here went that modern government was an aberration in the history of civilization, one that continually sought to leverage its massive power into engrossment of even more power, growing like a cancer on the otherwise healthy body of market society. Friedman in particular took the position that if he could explain this in simple and compelling ways to the public, in short sentences and punchy proposals and catchy slogans, they would respond favorably to his image of natural order, and voluntarily accept the political prescriptions offered them by the NTC.127 All that was required to offset the wayward course of history was some media coverage of a plucky little David standing up to the governmental Goliath. Friedman was the master of the faux-sympathetic stance, “I just want what you want; but the government never gives it to us. I can.”128 He remained faithful to this prescription to a fault, expending prodigious efforts on popular books, a television series, his Newsweek column, and his indefatigable willingness to debate the most diversified opponents on stages all over the world. He even bequeathed his fortune to fund the effort to undermine state-sponsored primary education, since that was where the state had brainwashed the largest number of tender minds. Of course, this notion of expert tutelage constituted the most superficial response that would have occurred to any postwar American economist of whatever stripe, given the presumptive role of the expert during the Cold War era.129 In that frame, the people were a featureless lump of clay to be molded by the charismatic expert. Friedman did in fact become the public face of the NTC in America from the 1960s to the 1990s; but his position was pitched too far into Pollyanna territory, and gave too many hostages to “democracy,” to suit the tougher-minded souls in the MPS.
The second, richer and more complex answer was proffered by Hayek. He did strive to maintain that there was a natural telos driving history in the neoliberal direction (although this surfaced only late in his career), but the obstacle to its realization was the treason of the intellectuals. He notoriously dismissed these “second-hand dealers in ideas,” and convened Mont Pèlerin as a countermovement to neutralize them politically in the longer run. This hostility was shared by many other members of the MPS, from Bertrand de Jouvenel to Raymond Aron. However, this set up a dynamic where Hayek eventually felt he had to distinguish between legitimate and fake organizations, or what he called “kosmos” versus “taxis.” The taxis, or constructed order, was usually “simple” and intentionally set up to serve a preconceived set of purposes. The kosmos, or spontaneous order, grew up organically without intended purpose, although it would persist due to the fact that it performed certain unforeseen functions in a superior manner. Participants didn’t need to know or understand the rules of a kosmos to go with the flow, but generally had to be compelled to follow the rules of a taxis. In his usual subtle manner, after defining it, Hayek invested the notion of taxis with negative connotations, and then equated it with institutions of formal government; whereas the kosmos came endowed with all manner of positive connotations, only to imperceptibly turn into his own neoliberal conception of the market.130
All this taxonomizing was fine; but the question that was motivating Hayek, even if he never adequately addressed it directly, was: What sort of “order” was the MPS, and what sort of order was the Neoliberal Thought Collective dedicated to bringing about?131 The provisional answer began by blurring the boundaries of the sharp distinction he had just wrought: “while the rules on which a spontaneous order rests may also be of spontaneous origin, this need not always be the case . . . it is possible that an order which would still have to be described as spontaneous rests on rules which were entirely the result of deliberate design . . . collaboration will always rest both on spontaneous order as well as deliberate organization.”132 Here he elided acknowledgment that the MPS and the larger NTC did not themselves qualify as a spontaneous order, if only because it was predicated upon stipulated rules that were not the same for all members; nor were they independent of any common purpose. When you unpacked all the shells of the Russian doll, it was just another elaborate hierarchical political movement.
But perhaps this might be mitigated in the instance it could be regarded as a mongrel amalgam of taxis and kosmos. Certainly, intentional stipulation could potentially have unintended consequences, which meant that almost any phenomenon was a mare’s nest of both kosmos and taxis elements; but Hayek decided he could not condone such promiscuity:
[I]t is
impossible, not only to replace spontaneous orders by organization and at the same time to utilize as much of the dispersed knowledge of all its members as possible, but also to improve or correct this order by interfering in it by direct commands. Such a combination of spontaneous order and organization it can never be rational to adopt.133
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