Philip Pilkington: The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part I – Hayek’s Delusion. By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying. – Marcel Proust Friedrich Hayek was an unusual character.
Although well known to be a libertarian political philosopher, he is also commonly associated with being an economist. So, Hayek turned instead to constructing political philosophies and honing a metaphysics rather than engaging in any substantial way with the new economics that was emerging. The over-arching argument of the book is well-known and need not be repeated too extensively here.
The implicit argument here was that, Britain for example, which had begun to increasingly plan its economy during the war, was on a slippery slope that would end in totalitarianism. The Rise of the Third Reich: Hayek’s Historical Repression An Existential Choice Hayek opted for the latter. Philip Pilkington: The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part II – The Americanisation of Hayek’s Delusion.
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil Shared psychotic disorder, or folie à deux, is a rare delusional disorder shared by two or, occasionally, more people with close emotional ties. An extensive review of the literature reveals cases of folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie à famille (all family members), and even a case involving a dog. – Medscape Reference In the previous part of our series on the origins of neoliberalism, we saw that the vigour mustered to start the movement on its way was generated by an enormous repression undertaken by the Austrian political philosopher Friedrich Hayek.
In the following two parts of the series we draw extensively on the excellent work which a number of historians of science have undertaken and published collectively in the volume The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. The Road to Serfdom: American Edition. Philip Pilkington: The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part III – Europe and the Centre-Left Fall under Hayek’s Spell.
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. – Sun Tzu In part one and two of this series we explored how Hayek waged war on what he thought was the cause of all the political ills of the 20th century: namely, economic planning in all its forms. We also saw that Hayek’s doctrine of classical liberalism and anti-statism proved too radical for American political and business establishment and that it required diluting by Milton Friedman.
We turn now to Europe, which would come to adopt its own form of neoliberalism. Motivations for a European Repression of History Europeans were, quite frankly, not as gullible as their American neighbours. Their problems were, however, much greater than their American compatriots. Folie à syndicat Conclusion: Neoliberalism Today. A Short History of Neoliberalism (And How We Can Fix It)
As a university lecturer I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism.
But today this assumption comes ready-made; it’s in the water, part of the common-sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike. It has not always been this way, however. For most of the 20th century, the basic policies that comprise today’s standard economic ideology would have been rejected as absurd.
So how did things change? Neoliberalism in the Western Context The story begins with the Great Depression in the 1930s, which was a consequence of what economists call a “crisis of overproduction.” They got their solution in the form of the “Volcker Shock.” Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics - 01 - 2013. Department of Economics public discussion Date: Wednesday 16 January 2013 Time: 6.30-8pm Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building Speaker: Dr Daniel Stedman Jones Respondents: Professor Mark Pennington, Professor Lord Skidelsky Chair: Professor Stuart Corbridge How did American and British policymakers become so enamoured with free markets, deregulation, and limited government? Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, Daniel Stedman Jones has traced the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since.
He contends that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics. Far from being the story of the simple triumph of right-wing ideas, the neoliberal breakthrough was contingent on the economic crises of the 1970s and the acceptance of the need for new policies by the political left. Daniel Stedman Jones is a barrister in London. Podcast & Video. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. How did American and British policymakers become so enamored with free markets, deregulation, and limited government? Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, Masters of the Universe traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since.
Paul Kelly finds that the various pieces of the puzzle do not quite fit together into a single picture. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton. Find this book: This review was originally posted on the LSE Review of Books Daniel Stedman Jones’s new book is yet another contribution to the academic reckoning of the global financial crisis. Although deeply interested in the subject matter and sympathetic to the view that ideas matter, I was disappointed that more attention was not devoted to developing the fundamental thesis. The birth of neoliberalism: New brooms. Popper liked to go a-wooing Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton University Press; 418 pages; $35 and £24.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk HOW did a few Viennese economists persuade a grocer’s daughter, a former film star and Europe’s greatest chicken farmer to unravel 40 years of state expansion?
Neoliberalism originated in Austria. Mr Stedman Jones teases out the professorial squabbles. Milton Friedman, a Chicago economist who headed the second wave of state-bashers, preferred the word “neoliberal” in a 1951 essay entitled, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects”. Friedman called for a new liberalism, seeing himself as the heir to Adam Smith, the 18th-century defender of the individual. Neoliberals like Friedman saw economic liberty as the safeguard of all freedoms; a swelling state was the road to tyranny.
How did these ideas become mainstream? But there is another reason. Friedrich Hayek. Milton Friedman.