Naturalizing the market on the road to revisionism: Bruce Caldwell'sHayek's challengeand the challenge of Hayek interpretation

Abstract

Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge should be welcomed as the first serious book on one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. However, this review begins by pointing out a number of curious omissions and silences concerning Hayek's career in the book. We propose that the key to understanding the turns and reversals in his thought lay in his politics, and not as Caldwell has it, in some abstract philosophical doctrines. Central to that thesis is Hayek's fostering the development of Neoliberalism through such institutional structures as the Mont Pèlerin Society.

Neoliberal Reason and Its Forms: De‐Politicisation Through Economisation

“…Subsequent universalisation of this category itself has led neoliberal reason to represent the entire social field-including both non-market economic and non-economic domains-through its grid of intelligibility. Once categories of politics, cultural difference and historicity are replaced by the transhistorical formalism of an economic grid that draws upon evolutionary models, neoliberal reason posits itself, in part through a strategic war of position within a public sphere that stretches across academic institutions, think-tanks, policy circles and the mass media, as a set of privileged expert discourses (of economisation) that is supposed to furnish governments with policy advice and the general public with opinion on all matters (Mirowski 2007). 11 The manner in which neoliberal reason and its distinct forms tend to shape actual policymaking can be illustrated, for instance, in the responses that are being devised to address the interrelated dual crises of environmental pollution and natural resource overuse.…”

‘Murketing’ and the rhetoric of the new sincerity

“…For now, it is important to acknowledge that Mirowski deploys the term murketing to name the rhetorical craft through which market liberalism and marketing savvy intermingle in demonstrably complicated though not necessarily contradictory ways. While this terminological inauguration emerges out of a prolonged dialogue with Hayekian political economy particularly and neoliberal anthropology more generally (see also Caldwell, 2005;Mirowski, 2007;Plehwe, 2009, Tadajewski et al, 2014;van Horn 2015), it is to the late American novelist, short-story writer, essayist and journalist David Foster Wallace that Mirowski attributes both murketing's technology and its phenomenology. Before quoting at length from Mister Squishy -a short story staged within a market research firm which dramatizes the iterative interplay between subjective testimony and objective data -Mirowski is uncharacteristically reverent.…”

The Interwar Period as a Machine Age: Mechanics, the Machine, Mechanisms, and the Market in Discourse

“…It is revealing that one of our most significant historians of economics began his work investigating the relations between physics and economics with a book entitled Against Mechanisms (Mirowski 1988). Like Caldwell, Mirowski describes Hayek as naturalising the market in terms of information flow from 1945 onwards, drawing attention to the role of the Mont Pèlerin Society and other institutions to further Hayek's political and intellectual aims (Mirowski 2002(Mirowski , 232-41, 2007.…”