Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown Paperback – Apr 15 2014

Short review:

Mirowski's book is one of the best on the crisis: he mixes the eye of an anthropologist or journalist examining our daily lives and then leaps up to 20,000 feet with ease to provide a wider intellectual and historical context. His take is novel, certainly from the Left, but well informed of debates on the Right. Empirical, but with a theoretical lens as well. If you want to understand not just the economics or politics of what happened, but to situate those events within a wider history of the ideas that played in a role in the Recession, Mirowski has an incredibly erudite account.

Long review:

Mirowski is a member of the "Institute for New Economic Thinking", an non-profit aimed to correct the orthodoxies of economics, "neoliberal" ideas in particular. He opens this book with a report from one of the first meetings, which happened to feature "bold and original thinkers" like Ken "Excel for Dummies" Rogoff, Larry Summers and Niall Ferguson. The meeting ended with a timid call to add an extra chapter to standard Econ101 textbooks briefly describing the crisis. Mirowski further rightly groans at hand-wringing over "happiness measurements", morality in markets and peevish complaints of "greedy bankers" (as if avarice has only existed in the past ten years.)

How did this rigidity come to be? Mirowski answers by suggesting that we must understand neoliberalism as a Russian doll. The innermost doll of experts emerged from the Mont Pelerlin Society, an organization that was by design very hierarchical. He describes, for instance, correspondence between Popper and Hayek. Popper, following his philosophy of open debate suggested that MPS should have at least one respectable socialist. Hayek shut down this idea, insisting that agreement on first principles was a necessary condition for membership. This tightly networked group of intellectuals slowly incubated neoliberalism and developed a political strategy for propagating it.

Mirowski further points out that the Neoliberal Thought Collective were excellent sloganeers. Friedman's most famous academic text, for instance, argues that a lack of government intervention caused the Great Depression: a series of rural bank failures caused by an overly tight supply of money. However, when Friedman penned his Newsweek column he claimed with a straight face that the government *caused* the Recession, that is, by a lack of action in expanding the supply of money and reducing interest rates. This is how the Russian doll works: nuance for the insiders, ignorance for the outsiders.

There is a further layer to the doll though. Pivoting off of Foucault's final lectures at the College of France, Mirowski argues that there is an everyday neoliberalism that has emerged. Beyond political theory and public policy, neoliberalism is experienced on a quotidian level and it is on that potent terrain that it has survived the crisis. I, right now, am taking time out of my day to write a book review which I will be paid nothing for, which is in the service of the Bezo empire to sell even more books and probably destroy more local bookshops and which will be used to further quantify me into some bits of data in the sky so I can be marketed to even more heavily. But but but: I am individually expressing myself! How free am I! The neoliberal self is a creature coerced into being a "free" entrepreneur. It is the poor un/underemployed soul who thinks himself to be a failure or inadequate because he was not lucky enough to ride the right wave. The old liberal arts dictum to "know thy self" becomes "express thy self, and monetize it too!" This middle chapter here is the most engrossing part of the book. Mirowski delves into a sundry of sources on our culture and then leverages a novel and erudite analysis of Foucault to bring it all into sharp focus.

In closing, it is truly ironic that the other review of this book is so gravely concerned that Mirowski might be a socialist. We have a wonderful little anthropological artifact here of the NTC at work: "Whatever this book says, it's got 'Red' in a chapter title. I am a Very Reasonable Person and thus must be suspicious." Let me assure him/her: there are no calls for a violent revolution of the proletariat. On the contrary, Mirowski heads out to the outermost layer of the doll and analyzes why neoliberalism won. In particular, he argues that the NTC provided a powerful account of the market as a natural entity that *cannot* be messed with. Consequently, the Recession had nothing to do with the structure of capitalism itself, it was just a "once in a lifetime" moment akin to a natural disaster. An act of God.

Mirowski's careful history here shows that just the opposite is true. There was a concerted effort to propagate a particular ignorance and the Recession itself is by no means removed from that particular effort.

If you want to understand American culture and how it has been changed subtly and gradually you will find it in this book. The author is verbose but I actually enjoy his writing. Sometimes I have to parse his sentences by separating the independent clauses and finding the subject and verb to understand what he is saying, but I do not mind that. I recommend keeping a dictionary handy as he uses a sophisticated vocabulary. But that is a benefit for anyone who wants to increase her vocabulary.

This is a great book. Or at least it is a great, detailed, rambling but always very pointed broadside, which is pretty cool. Many readers will learn a great deal every three or four pages. Hunches will be confirmed. For example, if you ever had a hunch that Michel Foucault had neoliberal hankerings, Mirowski shows you that your hunch is right. But Mirowski also makes it clear that you shouldn't be too proud of your hunch, because it does not exempt you from your own neoliberal assumptions. This is a book, as Mirowski says in an Antipode symposium, for "the left" -- in the sense of prodding the left to do some new development and distribution of its own epistemology. Good as Mirowski is at exposing delusional but powerful collective thinking, he lacks a theory of crisis. If he thinks that there is a crisis (and it appears that he thinks that there really is one), then it would seem that for his case to have the strongest legs possible it needs to include a theory of crisis. One last thing: anyone who wants to learn a lot of new vocabulary should start with Perry Anderson and then graduate to Philip Mirowski. The writing is very good.

This is perhaps the most significant work of economic history to emerge about neoliberalism in America since the 2008 crisis. Mirowski’s work escapes the simple causal categories which riddle so much of the fiscal crisis literature—here one finds carefully documented sociological analyses, of not only the economic presuppositions and frameworks that conditioned the neoliberal phase of financial capital, but equally of the political forms by which neoliberals operate. Mirowski argues that neoliberals are effective in managing power (and the crises their power produces) by operating as a “Thought Collective,” with interlocking think tanks, institutions, and diffuse sites of organizational initiative and coordination. In particular, social critics of neoliberalism should attend to his chapter “Everyday Neoliberalism,” which offers extraordinarily detailed, specific analyses of the micro-level conditions of neoliberalism in contemporary American life. Breaking from the Foucauldian literature (with its emphasis on biopolitics), Mirowski adopts and (esoteric/exoteric) distinction modeled on the Schmittian notion of the sovereign exception. Neoliberals, he argues, are not premised on laissez faire, but rather require a strong state to actively intervene in the formation of markets. This is a detailed and truly indispensable work for a critical understanding of the present.

I like Mirowski's earlier books -- "More Heat Than Light" and "Machine Dreams" -- but his later stuff is becoming unhinged. Mirowski's writing style has transformed from sarcastic-reflective historian to screeching blogger. Reading his recent stuff is rather like getting stuck on the bus wedged next to a Progressive version of Glenn Beck pinning all manner of conspiracies on "neoliberals." I wonder if he's ever had a serious conversation with the people he's so lathered up about.