The story of neoliberalism
There are two ways to tell the story of neoliberalism after its triumph. The first is a familiar narrative of hubris and excess. Neoliberals were zealots who carried their ideas too far.
The second way of telling the story begins by paying more attention to how economic ideas are generated, and how their progenitors reckon with messy realities.
Both Burns’s book and economists Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger’s Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 – the first volume of what will surely be the definitive biography of Friedrich von Hayek – are masterpieces in this respect, offering a pathway to reconstruct neoliberalism’s intellectual history.
In 1931, an invitation to lecture at the London School of Economics pulled Hayek out of the Austrian vortex and brought him into the center of a debate over how the state might compensate for the marketplace’s failures.
Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950, University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Jeremy Adelman Project Syndicate 6 October 2023
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