In 1945, Antony Fisher visited the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek at the London School of Economics. Fisher, an old Etonian who worked in the City, shared the Austrian’s belief that the nascent postwar welfare state would eventually lead to totalitarianism. Fisher wanted Hayek’s advice. Should he go into politics? No, the professor said, something like a thinktank would have far more “decisive influence in the great battle of ideas”.
Fisher went on to found the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the outfit widely credited, among other things, with incubating Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership. Fisher later moved to the US, where he set up the Atlas Network, an umbrella organisation that now covers more than 450 thinktanks, including influential groups such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Many are charities. Few name their donors.
Neoliberalism has come a long way since Hayek’s days at the LSE. The belief in the primacy of the free market, deregulation and globalisation has been political orthodoxy for the past 40 years. Embraced by Democrats and Republicans, Conservatives and Labour, neoliberalism is simultaneously all-encompassing and seldom, if ever, explicitly named.
Guardian columnist George Monbiot and film-maker Peter Hutchison have set out to lift the veil on this “invisible doctrine”. The result is a passionate, informed polemic that is short but packed with detail and incisive analysis.
The term “neoliberal” was coined at a conference in Paris in 1938 but properly took off six years later, with the publication of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The grandfather of neoliberalism argued that individuals acting in their own self-interest was the only bulwark against tyranny. The ultra-rich were, he said, heroic “independents”, staking out new territory beyond the reaches of nefarious governments.
Such arguments had little impact on the postwar consensus but would go on to inspire Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The success of Hayek’s ideas owed much to the invisible hand not of Adam Smith’s market forces, but the clandestine grip of dark money and hidden influence. DeWitt Wallace, the anti-communist co-founder of Reader’s Digest, published a condensed version of The Road to Serfdom for his 8 million subscribers (among them Antony Fisher). Hayek’s arguments were repackaged in serialised cartoons and children’s books.