Fragile Knowledge, Moral Pitfalls: Early Neoliberalism and Its Demise

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation of the intellectual origins of neoliberalism. Influenced by scientific modernism, its founders held that knowledge, being indeterminate and uncertain, was fragile. They feared that the authority of science could be corrupted and made to serve political aims opposed to liberal values. As a result, early neoliberals endeavored to rebuild the principles of liberalism from a moral-epistemological position. They put forward a moral and legal framework that could stabilize the market economy and embed liberal values in the process of science. Later neoliberals, however, set forth a more instrumental vision of morality and knowledge that unraveled the early neoliberal project.