The neoliberal thought collective

Years

From April 1947, with a fifty-year institutional build-out

Location

Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, then London, Chicago, Virginia and Geneva

Funder

Private business donors and a network of foundations. The funding structure is documented in Mirowski and Plehwe, and specific figures should be taken from there rather than from summary accounts.

Institution

Mont Pelerin Society, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Chicago School, the Virginia School

The climate

Defeat. In 1947 this was a marginal group convinced that the postwar consensus was permanent and that they had lost. The interesting question is not the doctrine. It is how a marginal network became the default administrative language of states within four decades.

What it adds, and why it is handled carefully here

This is the one cluster where the conspiracy-shaped reading is partly correct. Coordination is documented: there are meeting minutes, funding structures and personnel flows that can be read. That contradicts any assumption that hegemony is always impersonal drift.

It is also the reason this cluster needs the strictest evidentiary standard on the site rather than the loosest. Coordination is documented. Omnipotence is not. A network that spent forty years building institutions is not the same thing as a network that controls outcomes, and treating the two as identical is the fastest route to the second failure mode on the method page.

Read next to Gramsci: this is a successful war of position conducted from the right, and it is the best empirical test his strategy has ever had.

Key works

• Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin (2009). The archival collection.
• Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013). His central argument is that the movement's distinctive achievement was using state power to build and defend markets while speaking a language of state retreat.
• Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (2018), on the Geneva School designing supranational insulation of markets from democratic majorities. This is the most relevant strand for this site: control achieved by removing questions from the domain of decision altogether.
• Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion (2012).

The counterpoint, and it is essential

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). The self-regulating market was itself an act of state construction rather than a natural condition that states interfered with. Written before the Mont Pelerin meeting and answering it in advance.