Remaking laissez-faire

Abstract

`Only ideas can overcome ideas', Ludwig von Mises once remarked. Exploring this contention in relation to the long and winding ascendancy of neoliberalism, the paper presents a spatialized genealogy of the free-market ideational programme. From its multiple beginnings, in a series of situated, sympathetic critiques of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, neoliberalism has always been an open-ended, plural and adaptable project. The prehistories of neoliberalism are messy and nonlinear; there was no straight-line evolution from ideas to implementation, from blueprint to ballot box, or philosophy to practice. Rather like the various state projects of neoliberalization that have followed in its wake, the ideational project of neoliberalism was clearly a constructed one. There was nothing spontaneous about neoliberalism; it was speculatively planned, it was opportunistically built and it has been repeatedly reconstructed.