The Political Theory of Neoliberalism

"This book is not simply about Hayek. It’s about the neoliberals as a group. Neoliberalism can’t be understood as springing fully formed from the brow of Friedrich Hayek, but rather is the result of interactions that happen among this assortment of people that he brings together to try to hash out all of these contradictions that these people on the right are trying to live through. Biebricher is good for that because he’s European. He really knows the other groups that were important in Mont Pelerin, like the German Ordoliberals, the Geneva School, the Chicago School, and the French internationalists. He knows how to talk about this as a political project that is not completely unified. It wasn’t simply that Hayek set the tone, and everyone else marched in lockstep. Their problem was how to reconcile their desire for a strong state that intervenes regularly in the economy, while also claiming that everything has to be subordinate to the market, with the market in some sense the final arbiter of politics. It really doesn’t fit together very well. Biebricher is good on that inconsistency, and examines the way they talk a good game about wanting to limit the nation state and curtail its powers and so forth, but also seek to use the strong state to reform the economy, whatever that means. He constantly comes back to the point that some have principled answers to this apparent contradiction, but that they’re not the same answers. Biebricher has a couple of good observations on Hayek, as well. For Hayek, the idea of sovereignty is a metaphysical concept. He actually doesn’t think sovereignty is a real thing, which is unusual in a political theorist. He’s definitely not a democrat. Biebricher hammers that particular point home time and time again. Hayek has to play footsie with democracy, in some sense, but also wants to blame democracy for many of society’s ills. He also notes that there are a fair number of close parallels between Hayek and Carl Schmitt, who has a bad reputation as the ‘crown jurist of the Nazis’—a phrase from Hayek. But a lot of Carl Schmitt sounds like mid-career Hayek. The book doesn’t play up the American followers of Mont Pelerin quite as much as perhaps one might like. Having said that, in the English literature, there’s not as much about the Germans and the French, so that’s why this book is important, because it does cover them fairly well. Another complaint I have about the book is that there’s nothing at all about the group that formed around Murray Rothbard, then known as the ‘paleo-conservatives.’ One reason the right looks like it does today has to do with this breakaway group from within the neoliberals, around Murray Rothbard and the Mises Institute, and they smell a lot like Trumpism. Given it’s a book about politics, you might want it to talk about modern politics a little bit more. That’s what I meant by sovereignty being metaphysical. It’s as if he’s constantly denying that there is actual political authority, or that law is the product of intentional activity. Humans can’t be trusted to control their own destiny. This may seem strange to you, but it’s why, in the second half of his life, he goes absolutely all in for evolution. Evolution is the magic wand that serves to reconcile all that for Hayek. Evolution becomes his trademark way of trying to escape this central problem in his own political thought, of wanting to have a right-wing programme to occupy the state, but not really treating the state as though it’s this ongoing, powerful, unique entity that requires a coup. It’s a really curious position. Within the Mont Pelerin Society, there were many different and clashing views on what the state is. Some of them really do believe in the state as being an absolutely coherent entity, intellectually motivated in some way. Hayek doesn’t really believe such a thing. He’ll pay lip service to the idea that it’s got to be a democracy, but then amend it with the principle that you can’t really let the people determine very much. What kind of democracy is that? Is it just to placate and bamboozle the proles?"