Thus was born the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS): a closed intellectual network that provided the basic ideological infrastructure for neoliberalism to ferment. It is no exaggeration to say that almost all of the important figures in the postwar creation of neoliberalism were in attendance at its first meeting in 1947, including the Austrian economists, the UK liberals, the Chicago School, the German ordoliberals and a French contingent.

We do not resist a new world into being; we resist in the name of an old world. The contemporary emphasis on resistance therefore belies a defensive stance towards the encroachments of expansionary capitalism.

Over the course of three decades, this small community (pop. 2,700) has built up a ‘communist utopia’ that has expropriated land, built its own housing and co-operatives, kept living costs low, and provided work for everyone.

neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in ascribing a significant role to the state. A major task of neoliberalism has therefore been to take control of the state and repurpose it.

the Walter Lippmann Colloquium held in Paris just before the eruption of World War II. For the first time, this event brought together the classical liberal theorists, the new German ordoliberals, the British LSE liberals, and Austrian economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises

In the 1970s, however, both problems arose simultaneously – rising inflation and rising unemployment, or ‘stagflation’. The traditional Keynesian policy solutions were incapable of dealing with this conjunction, thus seemingly dictating a turn to alternative theories. It is important to be clear that, at this point, multiple interpretations of the economic problem were possible. The production of inflation through wage rigidities and trade union power was not the only possible framing of the problem, and neoliberalism was not the only possible solution.

By the mid 1990s, with the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism’s extension via IMF structural adjustment policies, its consolidation in the UK’s New Labour and Clinton’s US administration, and its ubiquity in the academic field of economics, neoliberalism had reached its hegemonic peak.

The novel conjunctural moment of the 1970s was quickly forgotten by the public, and neoliberalism took on the universal and natural qualities that Thatcher’s doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’ had espoused. Neoliberalism had become a new common sense, accepted by every party in power. It mattered little whether the left or right won; neoliberalism had stacked the deck.

In Jean-François Lyotard’s epochal definition, postmodernity was identified as the era that has grown to be suspicious of the grand metanarrative. On this account, postmodernity is a cultural condition of disillusionment with the kinds of grandiose narratives represented by capitalist, liberal and communist accounts of progress.

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, ‘synthetic freedom’ recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless.