Plehwe, Dieter
Book Part — Published Version
The making of a comprehensive transnational
discourse community
Provided in Cooperation with:
WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Suggested Citation: Plehwe, Dieter (2010) : The making of a comprehensive transnational discourse
community, In: Djelic, Marie-Laure Quack, Sigrid (Ed.): Transnational Communities: Shaping Global
Economic Governance, ISBN 978-0-511-77810-0, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.
305-326,
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511778100.014
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13 The making of a comprehensive
transnational discourse community
Dieter Plehwe
Introduction
The critique of state-centered approaches to international relations and
international political economy has resulted in a rapidly growing literature
focusing on a variety of “private authorities” in international relations (Cutler
et al. 1999). In this literature, arrays of transnational communities are promi-
nent subjects of analysis. Epistemic communities promoting new environmen-
tal standards, discourse communities pushing for new public management
across borders, and advocacy coalitions shaming the perpetrators of human
rights abuses, for example, have been observed and conceptualized in order to
shed light on the extent to which dispersed actors from diverse locations can
build and maintain crucial links, and develop social identities across borders. In
turn, these have been found important for setting political agendas, acquiring a
voice in policy implementation processes, policing compliance, and spreading
ideologies more generally (Haas 1992a; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bislev et al.
2002; Djelic 2006). At the same time, it is becoming clear that many of these
transnational communities recruit their members among private as well as
public constituencies. A study of these communities thus also needs specifically
to address the linkages between civil society, business, and the public sphere.
Transnational community research has also contributed to the rise of social
constructivist approaches in international relations (Risse 2007). However,
given the increasing attention paid to knowledge, ideas, and discourse, it is
surprising how little international relations scholarship in general, and trans-
national community research in particular, have had to say so far about the
global rise of neoliberal discourse. Even the neo-Gramscian international
political economy literature has focused so far mostly on corporate planning
groups and the rise of neoliberalism. Only recently has more attention been
paid to the wider role of intellectuals and knowledge production (Plehwe et al.
2006; Horn 2009). Popular accounts of neoliberal hegemony once again
privilege structural features of the remaining superpower, the USA, in com-
bination with the power of global financial institutions or the financialization
of big business, and pay scant attention to the role of intellectuals and
the formation of actor preferences (Harvey 2005). The earlier rise of
Keynesianism, by contrast, has been subjected to comparative analysis with
one eye on the role of ideas and intellectuals at the national level (Hall 1989),
and the authors were rightly scolded for ignoring the transnational dimension
(Hirschman 1989). Given the present global financial and economic crisis, a
better understanding of how neoliberalism became a key ideology for
explaining the world is central to assessing how likely it is that alternative
interpretations will become authoritative and politically relevant, both in
leading global policy circles and among the general public.
In order to grasp how interests come to be understood and actor preferences
formed in transnational communities which influen ce global policy-making,
it becomes necessary – and particularly interesting – to attain a better under-
standing of intellectual efforts to develop, shape, prioritize, and possibly gene ralize
preferences and perspectives. It certainly is not accidental that much research on
private authority focuses on transnational communities specializing in matters of
knowledge and expertise – sometimes, unfortunately, even at the expense of
addressing the links between knowledge, interpretation, and interest. Specific
and particularistic interests can attain the status of general interests only if they
are well understood, expressed, and advocated, as well as effectively legitimized.
Efforts to obtain authority and legitimacy for knowledge involve substantive,
strategic, and tactical knowledge processing and, more often than not, claims
about the scientific accuracy and truth of the generated results. In order to
effectively organize the chain of knowledge required in this process, what was
originall y only an in tuitiv e understanding o f the intellectual division of labor has
been developed more consciously since World War II in response to the impor-
tant nexus of knowledge and power, the increasing importance of national and
international media, and the ubiquity of information at the current stage of the
knowledge society (Walpen 2004; Plehwe and Walpen 2006). At the same time,
the relevance of ideology in the politics of knowledge has been effectively
disguised by ubiquitous claims to scientificstatus(FischerandForrester1993).
The argument in the present chapter is twofold. First, it is necessary to
consider – both separately and together – the generation of philosophical or
upstream knowledge, the production of disciplinary academic knowledge,
and, further downstream, applied knowledge such as policy advice and jour-
nalistic information in order better to grasp the ways in which transnational
communities rise and function. Second, a sufficiently detailed analysis of the
306 Dieter Plehwe
organization of knowledge chains along the policy cycle and during specific
stages (of alerting, agenda-setting, policy proposals, implementation, and so on)
can yield important insights with regard to the influence of private authorities in
international relations and the evolution of global knowledge fields.
In what follows, I will briefly discuss epistemic community, advocacy coalition,
and discourse community research to establish why yet another category of
transnational community is needed to understand the role and impact of trans-
national communities that are capable of knowledge production and processing
well beyond the types that have been conceptualized and studied so far. The main
body of the chapter investigates the historical roots and evolution of the compre-
hensive community of neoliberal intellectuals. The potential theoretical and
empirical advances arising from a more systematic analysis of comprehensive
transnational discourse communities are discussed in the conclusion.
Types of transnational community: commonalities, differences,
and open questions
International relations scholars have observed and conceptualized various
types of transnational communities in respect of their distinctive capacities
for international policy-making. However, little is known about the emer-
gence of the basic values and principled beliefs on which the working and
regulatory impact of such communities are based. Typically, these values and
beliefs are taken for granted, with no effort to analyze their origin. This can be
argued, for instance, for three types of transnational community – epistemic
communities, advocacy networks, and discourse communities – that are at the
core of debates among international relations and international political
economy scholars.
1
Transnational epistemic communities
Epistemic communities have been conceptualized in an effort to explain
preference formation in the face of new and challenging issues confronted
by traditional players without prior experience and sufficient expertise.
Foreign affairs officials, for example, operate in conditions of relative or
substantial uncertainty. Haas (1992b: 1) emphasized the “growing technical
uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern,” requiring
improvements in international policy coordination. He challenged realist
assumptions about easily identified state interests directly determining state
307 The making of a transnational discourse community
preferences in international relations. Decision-makers are considered ill-
prepared, if not incapable of identifying and pursuing interests if they are
not sufficiently familiar with the technical aspects of specific problems.
In this context, epistemic communities of scientists and experts are seen as
influential groups able to shape policy agendas. An epistemic community,
according to Haas (1992b: 3), is “a network of professionals with recognized
expertise and competence in a particular domain and authoritative claim to
policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue area.” Characteristic
are shared normative and causal beliefs, shared notions of validity, and a
common policy enterprise. An incipient epistemic community can be turned
into a collective force when such individuals discover each other, and forge an
alliance with social agency capabilities beyond a mere combination of indivi-
dual capacities.
Various case studies (for example, free trade in services [see Drake and
Nicolaïdis 1992] and the ban on chlorofluorocarbons [see Haas 1992a]) evi-
dence the power of epistemic communities to set new agendas in international
policy deliberations. A networked community’s power can be seen to be wan-
ing, however, once the policy process moves downstream into formal arenas
allegedly dominated by state interests, and thus into the realm in which tradi-
tional international relations approaches focusing on the explanatory power of
national interests and relative positions of power are considered adequate.
While rightly praised for bringing into focus important transnational actor
constellations in specific and important knowledge production areas relevant
to agenda-setting processes, Haas focuses too strongly on the expert status of
epistemic community members. In terms of the groups studied, however, such
communities may be better understood as power elites in C. Wright Mills’s
sense due to their weight as corporate research directors or heads of public
research institutions, for example. And their influence may not always be as
positive as in the case of banning chlorofluorocarbons. The epistemic com-
munity approach has also been criticized as limiting the attention paid to such
unofficial influence on agenda-setting, as well as to basic knowledge aspects
within transnational epistemic communities (Bislev et al. 2002: 208; Adler
2005). Others have challenged the approach’s elite focus, proposing consid-
eration also of more stratified transnational advocacy networks.
Transnational advocacy networks
These can be considered transnational communities even if the authors settled
for a different name. According to Keck and Sikkink (1998: 2), members of
308 Dieter Plehwe
transnational advocacy networks are “bound together by shared values, a
common discourse, dense exchanges of information and services.” In issue
areas such as human rights, ecology, gender, development, and peace such
networks have built “new links among actors in civil societies, states, and
international organizations” and thereby “multiply channels of access to the
international system” (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 1).
Advocacy networks do not differ from epistemic communities because of
the absence of shared values, as Keck and Sikkink (1998: 1) claim, but in terms
of social composition and resources. While the latter are communities of
scientists and experts primarily mobilizing their scientific knowledge, the
former comprise a broader range of social strata and relatively weak – in
terms of ready resources – non-governmental organizations that obtain influ-
ence due to their ability to gather and report reliable information (information
politics), to dramatize facts (symbolic politics), to effectively exert material
pressure by linking the issues to money, trade, or prestige (leverage politics),
and to exert moral pressure by publicly scrutinizing the extent to which
organizations adhere to principles they have endorsed (accountability poli-
tics). Another distinguishing feature is the degree of immediacy inherent in
the two types. Members of epistemic communities are likely to know each
other, while transnational advocacy networks are likely to operate frequently
as distant, largely imagined communities many of whose members know of
each other at best (see Djelic and Quack in this volume).
Finally, transnational advocacy networks have been shown to influence
policy-making beyond the agenda-setting stage of the policy process. Keck
and Sikkink (1998) observed a wide range of campaign influences. Such
networks are found to be capable of correcting agendas, enforcing agenda
elements, and punishing their neglect. These may be regarded as modi fication,
maintenance, or reproduction functions in addition to the initiation and
innovation functions attributed to epistemic communities. While focusing
on a single issue such as tropical deforestation, the authors also account for the
way in which a single environmental issue is linked to other environmental
issues, and pay attention to interlocking epistemic communities, for example,
linking environmental and social issue areas.
Curiously, all the examples studied are progressive transnational advocacy
networks, which seems to reflect a normative bias and/or limits with regard to
an analytical understanding of civil society in this framework – despite the
conceptual understanding of civil society as a sphere of struggle between
competing forces. By drawing too sharp a distinction between business and
business-related actor groups and civil society actors, which are effectively
309 The making of a transnational discourse community
identified with non-profit or third sector groups, Keck and Sikkink (1998) do
not examine the extent to which a broader range of “private” knowledge
actors – and neoliberal and neoconservative forces in particular – are likewise
involved in the highly uneven formation of transnational civil society, for
example, in the field of legal services. This contrasts with the work of Dezalay
and Garth (2002) who strongly emphasize “top-down participatory develop-
ment” in the field of human rights, designed to secure legitimacy for neoliberal
capitalism rather than advance a genuine agenda for bottom-up networks.
Transnational discourse communities
Transnational discourse communities, in contrast, have been observed pre-
dominantly at the conservative end of the political spectrum. Bislev et al.
(2002: 208) go beyond analysis of the production of basic knowledge in
transnational epistemic and advocacy communities, and highlight the trans-
mission of prescriptive knowledge. This implies a critical view of knowledge as
part of the social power structure, which differs from the perception of
knowledge as a “neutral” resource that prevails in much of epistemic com-
munity and advocacy coalition research (Fischer 2003). The analysis of
discourse communities, therefore, avoids the normative and problem-solving
bias that characterizes much of the transnational community research pre-
viously discussed.
2
But transnational discourse communities are found to
influence knowledge transfer far beyond the agenda-setting stage. The
promotion of public–private partnerships in local government and commer-
cialization in higher education are illustrations.
According to Bislev et al. (2002), activities supported by the German
Bertelsmann Foundation were crucial in developing and maintaining a
transnational network of civil society actors and local public officials, and
ultimately in transforming local government practices. Schöller’s and Groh’s
(2006) work on a Bertelsmann-related discourse community in the field of
higher education shows how Foundation officials have managed to concert an
unlikely group of fellow travelers, including neoliberal think tanks such as
Germany’s Ludwig Erhard Foundation, as well as traditional constituencies of
social liberalism such as Germany’s Social Democrats, trade unionists, and
Greens. They all embraced the Foundation’s vision of marketizing higher
education. Alas, neither study shows how the Foundation’s neoliberal funda-
mental values and principled beliefs, evidenced in its promotion of new
public management and the commercialization of culture, emerged in the
first place.
310 Dieter Plehwe
Open questions: the origins of basic values and principled beliefs
While the international relations and international political economy litera-
ture, as summarized above, discusses the practices and effects of various types
of transnational communities, the origins of their underlying values and
principled beliefs remain obscure. In order to clarify them we must leave
behind specific transnational epistemic, advocacy, or discourse communities
and take a more comprehensive approach. Adler’s (2005: 22) notion of
transnational communities of practice
3
attempts to provide a more general-
ized account of the ideational dimension of cross-border social formations.
“Most of the transnational communities described in the IR literature are in
fact species of communities of practice,” according to Adler (2005: 16).
From this perspective, transmission of meaning rather than the provision of
“objective” information is considered the most important contribution of
transnational communities to policy-making. The most far-reaching effect
of epistemic communities, according to Adler (2005: 16), “is cognitive evolu-
tion, i.e., the constitution of new practices that may be used by both present
and future generations of practitioners and may constitute the basis of
transformation of the identities and interests of an increasing number of
people.” However, Adler’seffort to address the yawning gap in the literature
with regard to the explanation of shared values and principled beliefs unwit-
tingly turns into an effort to stress the fundamental importance of social
communication and constructivism in general. At least, he fails to explain
the origins and political nature of the social construction of fundamental
values and principled beliefs like the other transnational community scholars
who unequivocally emphasize their fundamental importance.
Considering different levels of abstraction, more concrete and competing
meanings are crucial in solving the puzzle of value origins. “Values emerge in
experiences of self formation and self transcendence,” writes Joas (1999: 255)
in his summary of classical contributions by Nietzsche, Durkheim, Dewey,
and others. But unlike Adler he proceeds to clarify possible misunderstand-
ings arising at such a general level of anthropological abstraction. For our
purposes it is interesting to look at his reflections on the polysemy of the word
“origin.”
First, “origin” can refer to the historically first announcement of a value.
Second, it can refer to the efforts of a small, eventually growing group of
disciples championing this value – an original community. Third, it can mean
the rise of new ties between individuals and values (for example, conversion
from Catholicism to Protestantism), which are not historically new – the
311 The making of a transnational discourse community
joining of an imagined community. And fourth, it can refer to the revival of
weak, almost forgotten values (Joas 1999: 257).
In the case of transnational epistemic communities, advocacy coalitions, and
discoursecommunitiesweareprobablydealingwithorigininthethirdand
fourth senses of Joas’senumeration– joining an existing imagined community
and reviving a community – sinceitisunlikelythatthevaluesandprincipled
beliefs uniting fairly recent and specific transnational communities are historically
new. In order to understand the historical origins and evolution of fundamental
meanings and values in the first and second senses, a certain amount of longue
durée historical efforts to account for the birth of new philosophical systems
(religious or secular, for example, Enlightenment, social democracy, and so on)
are indispensable for understanding when and why intellectuals first announced
and started to champion historically new values and principled beliefs, which in
turn makes it possible for others eventually to convert to or revive them.
In order to explain the origins of neoliberal values and principled beliefs,
and the evolution of knowledge based on neoliberal philosophical founda-
tions, I suggest, one has to go back to a transnational community of neoliberal
intellectuals (Walpen 2004; Plehwe and Walpen 2006; Mirowski and Plehwe
2009), which is best understood as a comprehensive discourse community.
This is an organized network of intellectuals who originally conceive of or
recombine, recognize, maintain, and further develop a distinct set of funda-
mental values and principled beliefs that constitute their social identity or an
important part thereof. They forge a normative and transdisciplinary basis or
worldview informing the development of knowledge and expertise, scientific
and otherwise, as well as other professional competencies in multiple
domains. Claims to authoritative policy-relevant knowledge within multiple
domains or issue areas can be made within the community and in discourse
coalitions. A comprehensive discourse community can be conceived as or turn
into a transnational comprehensive discourse community depending on the
circumstances of the making of the community.
Transnational roots and evolutions: the comprehensive community
of neoliberal intellectuals
The term “neoliberalism” has a prehistory in early twentieth-century political
and economic thought (Walpen 2000). But the post-World War II concept of
neoliberalism developed and shared by the members of the neoliberal
transnational discourse community first came into view in the 1930s.
312 Dieter Plehwe
Contemporary neoliberalism emerged as a result of intellectual confrontations
triggered by the Great Depression. Mass unemployment and social unrest
challenged the very existence of the capitalist order. This led the early associ-
ates of the emerging neoliberal community to face the shortcomings of
traditional liberal values and principled beliefs, in addition to confronting
the perceived threat of socialism and planning.
Uprooted cosmopolitans: neoliberalism in exile
Many of the participants in the initial neoliberal deliberations of the 1930s had
already interacted across borders in numerous ways for at least a decade. Quite
a few had passed through Vienna and Ludwig von Mises’s Privatseminar
during the 1920s, for example. In Vienna, the efforts of Austrian economists
such as von Mises and von Hayek were dedicated to disputing the socialist
claims to knowledge authority in the famous socialist calculation debate. By
the mid-1930s, however, the participants in a by then more closely knit
neoliberal community had experienced the collapse of traditional liberalism
in country after country, and many had become uprooted cosmopolitans.
Unlike Tarrow’s rooted cosmopolitans (see the introduction to this volume),
prominent Austrian, German, and Italian academics had become conservative
refugees from the countries ruled by Nazis and fascists, and needed to develop
flexibility with regard to their home bases. Swiss members of the incipient
neoliberal community, such as William E. Rappard, provided a safe haven for
the likes of Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, and Luigi Einaudi. Other
Austrians and Germans found refuge in far away New Zealand (Karl Popper),
the UK (Friedrich von Hayek), the USA (Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup),
and Turkey (Alexander Rüstow) (Feichtinger 2001).
If the Vienna o f the 1920s displayed a very l ively “science between
cultures” (Feichtinger 2001), the exiled members of the transnational
community were forced to cross cultures and to find a pedigree in a transna-
tional community they themselves were nurturing joint ly with like-minded
colleagues from the UK and the USA, in addition to Switzerland, France, and
a few other scattered places in Scandinavia, Mex ico, and South Africa
(Walpen 2004). Later characteri stics of the c omprehensive transnational
community of neoliberals – internationalism, int erdisciplinary work, and
the mobilization of private business and corporate foundation resources for
the advancement of academic and other projects – canbediscernedinthe
formative life experiences of leading neoliberals. Many neoliberal intellec-
tuals w ere not welcome a t the universities of their home countries, but quite
313 The making of a transnational discourse community
a few were unable to secure jobs at universities in their host countries either and
so had to look elsewhere for ways of making a living. Entrepreneurship and
cosmopolitanism thus were not just key aspects of economic theorizing; they
had a distinct existential and emotional appeal apart from providing the
material basis needed to procure economic – and intellectual – independence
(Plehwe 2009a).
Partly due to emigration and parallel experiences the term “neoliberalism”
started to appear in multiple contexts in the 1930s (in France, Switzerland,
Germany, and the UK, for example), eventually to become established as the
main designation of a new intellectual/political movement (Walpen 2000). An
important discussion took place in France from 1935 onwards. A loose group
of economists, philosophers, and sociologists
4
located in Paris would later be
involved in organizing the Colloque Walter Lippmann (CWL 1939).
Walter Lippmann’s book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society
published in 1937 (Lippmann 1937) contained a principled statement of the
superiority of the market economy over an economy planned by the state. He
restated many traditional liberal values and principled beliefs in terms of
individual freedom, private property, and so on, but the book also featured a
clear understanding of the fundamental and far-reaching positive role of the
state in providing protection from interest group politics. Such a strong and
impartial state was regarded as necessary for tasks that went far beyond the
liberal night-watchman state, albeit in ways different from the planning state
of the social liberals. This state was to be enabled to guide the population by
learning what they want, namely a free capitalist economic and social order, as
advocated by neoliberal intellectuals, and not socialist planning. Lippmann
thus wanted individuals to be free to choose only what he and other neolib-
erals perceived as the best social order, and the state was regarded as quintes-
sential to securing such an order. Traditional liberal political values such as the
right to form coalitions and voting rights had at the same time become
fundamentally suspicious due to the rise of socialist trade unions, and social
democratic, communist, and fascist political parties. Significantly, “totalitar-
ianism” was discussed by Lippmann primarily with regard to the absence of
private property rather than the more commonplace reference to a lack of
democracy or countervailing political power.
The French philosopher Louis Rougier invited over thirty intellectuals to
Paris to discuss Lippmann’s book at the Colloque Walter Lippmann: a total of
twenty-six participated, and fifteen of those (among others Raymond Aron,
Louis Baudin, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Polanyi,
Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow) would participate in the founding
314 Dieter Plehwe
of the Mont Pèlerin Society nine years later. The participants discussed the
need for a new liberal program in science and society, which was eventually
labeled “neoliberal.” The term won out over alternatives such as positive
liberalism. The group launched a project agenda, a journal (Cahiers du
Libéralisme), and a think tank with several locations (Denord 2001). The
concept of “neoliberalism” was defined in 1938 as including:
the priority of the price mechanism;
free enterprise;
competition; and
a strong and impartial state (Walpen 2004: 60–61).
While opposing social liberalism and socialism, the participating intellectuals
had to stop thinking of the state in mostly (if not purely) negative terms after
the Great Depression, and formed the nucleus of the transnational neoliberal
discourse community. The German contingent of economists, such as Walter
Eucken, Alexander Rüstow, and Wilhelm Röpke, at this point had already
gone further than the London-based scholars around Lionel Robbins and
F. A. von Hayek in distancing themselves from classical liberalism. They were
already discussing the tasks of a “new liberalism” on the eve of the Nazis’ rise
to power. Significantly for later developments, Rüstow explicitly called for a
“liberal interventionism” (Ptak 2004).
The outbreak of World War II put an abrupt stop to this nascent attempt to
consolidate the transnational community and to organize (neo)liberal forces.
At the Paris conference it was also not yet time to further clarify the set of
neoliberal values and principled beliefs. Twelve years later at the first meeting
of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) considerable work would be invested to
this end by way of drafting this group’s statement of aims. However, the clear
recognition of a two-pronged effort – against socialism and naturalistic
liberalism (compare Foucault 2004) – guided the work of the carefully selected
intellectuals who were invited to join the subsequent discussion, deliberately
excluding representatives of the other new liberalism, mainstream social
liberalism.
5
Consolidating the transnational discourse community
With the conclusion of the fighting in 1945, several members of the neoliberal
community were eager to resume the tasks neglected during the war. A
number of well-known intellectuals in Europe and the United States even-
tually assembled for more than a week over Easter in Mont Pèlerin, a village
close to Lake Geneva. A Swiss businessman, Albert Hunold, and Hayek were
315 The making of a transnational discourse community
the main organizers. The internationalist outlook and organizational effort
were made possible by some timely corporate/institutional support. The
Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York,
which dated from 1946 and employed Ludwig von Mises, and the William
Volker Fund based in Kansas City provided subsidies, as did European and US
universities that employed community members (LSE, Chicago, and so on).
The Volker Fund was led by future MPS member Harold Luhnow and
provided travel funds for the US participants. Of the total conference costs
of 18,000 Swiss francs, the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (today Credit Suisse)
paid 15,000 (Steiner 2007). US historian George H. Nash (1998 [1976]: 26)
described the mood of the post-War community of neoliberals:
[T]he participants, high in the Swiss Alps, were only too conscious that they were
outnumbered and without apparent influence on policy-makers in the Western
world. All across Europe, planning and socialism seemed ascendant.
But the failure of classical liberalism continued to be high on the agenda as
well. Traditional liberalism was doomed, according to Hayek, because of
crippling conceptual flaws, and the only way to diagnose and rectify them
was a withdrawal into a small and tightly controlled group – a comprehensive
transnational discourse community. As Hayek said in his opening address at
the first meeting:
[E]ffective endeavors to elaborate the general principles of a liberal order are practic-
able only among a group of people who are in agreement on fundamentals, and
among whom basic conceptions are not questioned at every step ... What we need are
people who have faced the arguments from the other side, w ho have struggled with
them and fought themselves through to a position from which they can both critically
meet the objections against it and justify their own views ... this should be regarded
as a private meeting and all that is said here in discussion as “off the record” ...it must
remain a closed society, not open to all and sundry. (Hayek 1967: 149, 151, 153, 158)
Longstanding ties across borders had been important with regard to the early
recruiting efforts of the MPS: Hayek, Mises, Polanyi, Robbins, and Röpke were
MPS founding members who had already participated in the 1938
Colloquium, and other CWL participants (including Raymond Aron, Louis
Baudin, and Alexander Rüstow) were involved in the efforts to launch the
MPS (Walpen 2004: 84f., 388, 391). Despite the precautions taken over
original membership and participation, it was by no means easy for the
early MPS members to specify precisely what held them together, and even
more what they wanted to achieve. But the forging of a purposeful transna-
tional community required at least some clarification of the common
316 Dieter Plehwe
understanding and objectives. To this end, the participating members engaged
in a prolonged discussion of what eventually became the official statement of
the aims of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Lionel Robbins was charged with
drafting the statement:
The central values of civilizatio n are in danger ... The group holds that these
developments have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies
all absolute moral standards and by the growth of theories which question the
desirability of the rule of law. It holds further that they have been fostered by a decline
of belief in private property and the competitive market; for without the diffused
power and initiative associated with these institutions it is difficult to imagine a
society in which freedom may be effectively preserved. Believing that what is
essentially an ideological movement must be met by intellectual argument and the
reassertion of valid ideas ...
6
[...]
The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticu-
lous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is
solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds in spired by certain ideals
and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and
improvement of the free society. (Hartwell 1995: 41–42)
The statement of aims thus expressly refers to views inspired by certain
ideals and broad conceptions. Among t he key p rincipled beliefs was a very
clear understandi ng of the politica l charact er of t he soc ial or der, a nd the
state. To “preserve and i mprove” conditions for a “free society,” individual
“initiative,” and a “liberal order,” key neoliberal values, some of t he sacred
cows of traditional liberalism had to be slaughtered. Henceforth the debate
was not about whether or not to intervene and regulate, but how and to what
extent. Due to the recognition of social, political, and economic dynamics , a
belief in immutable and universal liberal values, with the notable absence of
democracy and timeless economic truthssuchasmarketcompetitionand
initiative, was combined with full recognition of the need to safeguard and
protect such an order. The members of the comprehensive transnational
community anticipated a wide range of battles to be fought – ranging from
explaining the present crisis over redefining state functions and minimal
standards to re writing history. The tasks neoliberals felt in need of tackling
indicate that not only Antonio Gramsci understood the preconditions of
hegemony, the importance of civil society, and a long-term “war of position”
necessary to exer t influence. The neoliberal comprehensive discourse
community in fact took a right-wing neo-Gramscian perspective a t t he
transnational level.
317 The making of a transnational discourse community
At subsequent MPS meetings the transnational community made strong
efforts to clarify the general understanding of neoliberalism in respect of more
specific questions and issue areas. Discussion was dedicated to the question of
the relationship between liberalism and Socialism, Christianity, or European
integration, among other things. The Swiss MPS member and Neue Zürcher
Zeitung journalist Carlo Mötteli reported on the debate on liberalism and
underdeveloped countries in Beauvallon, France (1951) as follows: “But while
the old system of laisser faire, laisser aller is as much out of the question in
underdeveloped areas as elsewhere, hope exists that the principles and policies
of neoliberalism will find a promising field of activity and development there”
(Plehwe 2009b).
By means of the Mont Pèlerin foundation we can more easily observe the
composition of a major part of the comprehensive transnational community
of neoliberal intellectuals, which managed to consolidate during the 1950s and
1960s. At Mont Pèlerin and subsequent meetings university professors
mingled with journalists, foundation/think tank executives, business execu-
tives, and publishing houses. By 1951 several leading political figures (includ-
ing Ludwig Erhard and Luigi Einaudi) were accepted into the ranks.
Throughout the history of the neoliberal discourse community members
have been recruited with an eye to combining the academic and professional
qualifications necessary to last the distance in public debates and battles of
opinion. Alongside academics come more than a hundred members employed
in partisan (advocacy) think tanks founded or run by MPS members, for
example, and journalists of major (business) newspapers such as the Wall
Street Journal, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung have regularly been recruited (compare Plehwe and Walpen 2006;
Plehwe 2008 for further analysis of membership composition).
The neoliberal transnational community demonstrated comprehensiveness
and considerable capacity with regard to both the conception of values and
principled beliefs, and the pursuit of a wide range of knowledge projects. Only
once so far, and relatively early, has the community experienced a serious
crisis. In the late 1950s/early 1960s a group of community members led by
Wilhelm Röpke and Albert Hunold wanted the Mont Pèlerin Society to go
public directly with straightforward political, anti-communist messages.
Other members, led by Hayek, objected, and the community almost disin-
tegrated (cf. Walpen 2004: 145f. on the Hunold–Hayek affair). The crisis was
solved by adhering to the original ideas about communal seclusion, combined
with intermediate and decentralized public intervention relying on partisan
think tanks. While the group lost a few of its prominent members as a result of
318 Dieter Plehwe
the crisis, politicizing the community would surely have led to greater
fatalities, and more likely than not discontinued the comprehensive neoliberal
discourse community. Further and full consolidation of the original identity
and purpose of the community instead provided the basis for future extension.
Expanding the community
The MPS community rapidly adjusted to the US post-War rise to economic
hegemony in terms of membership,
7
though Europe arguably remained of
equal if not greater importance as an epicenter of the neoliberal discourse
community. When membership reached 500, the leaders of the MPS decided
against further growth in an effort to preserve at least some of the immediacy
and intimacy of the original community effort. By the end of the 1970s certainly
many more community members existed than card carrying members of the
MPS, and the immediate community of directly connected neoliberals had
succeeded in creating an imagined community of intermediately connected
neoliberals around the world. Partly responsible for this were dedicated efforts
to establish partisan think tanks. By the late 1970s, more than thirty had been
founded, even before the neoliberal think tank boom of the 1980s and 1990s
(Walpen 2004). To accommodate more active community members, local
groups were formed akin to the Mont Pèlerin Society in several countries, for
example, the Philadelphia Society in the USA. By the time Reagan and Thatcher
rose to power in the United States and the United Kingdom respectively,
the comprehensive transnational community of neoliberal intellectuals was a
well-established if barely visible para-political force around the globe.
Even if operating with 500 members already precludes the close acquain-
tance of most community members, the MPS can be considered an extremely
important social context for the ongoing reproduction of an immediate
neoliberal community. A quantitative analysis of participation in MPS general
meetings from 1947 until 1986 proves that quite a number of members
frequently and jointly participate in the general meetings.
Key community members attended 75 percent of the meetings held during
particular periods or more (Plehwe 2008). Unsurprisingly, such frequent fliers
include most of the key officials who formally served the MPS as presidents or
general secretaries, but also includes a group of journalists and publishers,
corporate leaders, think tank officials, and a politician. Marie-Thérèse Genin, a
French publisher who helped to get major books by neoliberal authors translated
and published, is the only woman amongtheregulars.Sheisamongthefew
frequent attendants who never chaired a panel or gave a paper, a fate shared by
319 The making of a transnational discourse community
the few other women who were among the earlier community members (Plehwe
2008). Only more recently have women moved higher up the ranks of the MPS;
Professor Victoria Curzon-Price from Switzerland was elected president in 2004.
Many MPS members met not only at conferences organized by the MPS, but also
in other professional venues, and privately. Commenting on an early draft of
Hartwell’s (1995) MP S history, Christian Gandil (1986) named several friends he
had made among US-based MPS members, and whom he visited privately
when he travelled to the United States. Gandil explains that “the basis for a
friendship is to be in agreement concerning outlook on life.”
Beyond forging community ties among members, arguably the most
important practical activity of the comprehensive neoliberal discourse com-
munity has been the founding and running of think tanks. More than a
hundred think tanks can be identified with MPS members as founders or
leaders (Plehwe and Walpen 2006). Think tanks such as the Heritage
Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute in the
USA, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute in the
UK, and the Stiftung Marktwirtschaft in Germany have grown into major
research, consulting, and lobby organizations. In both Guatemala and
Argentina, efforts originally restricted to think tanks eventually led to the
founding of major universities (Goodman and Marotz-Baden 1990). A few
members of the comprehensive neoliberal discourse community have been
instrumental in replicating think tank methodologies across the world.
Antony Fisher, founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, has been the
key person behind neoliberal think tank entrepreneurship, founding the Atlas
Economic Research Foundation in the early 1980s to assist and coordinate
global think tank activities. Key neoliberal policy projects such as privatiza-
tion, deregulation, or flat tax proposals were propagated first in neoliberal
think tank circuits, and then conquered regulatory politics (Cockett 1994;
Yergin and Stanislaw 1998; Frost 2002; Plehwe and Walpen 2006). It is
impossible to explain the rise of regulatory capitalism (Levi-Faur 2005) with-
out acknowledging the multiple role and singular agenda-setting power of the
comprehensive neoliberal discourse coalition.
New frontiers: comprehensive transnational community
and coalition research
The transnational community of neoliberal intellectuals introduced in this
chapter differs in important ways from the transnational communities that
320 Dieter Plehwe
have been studied so far, although it shares and combines important
characteristics of epistemic communities, advocacy networks, and discourse
communities. The comprehensive neoliberal discourse community comprises a
knowledge elite membership similar to the one described in epistemic commu-
nity research. But a careful look at the organizational background reveals the
partisan political character of a knowledge power elite rather than conforming
to the image of the international academy proposed by Hayek. The compre-
hensive transnational community of neoliberal intellectuals was capable alone
or in discourse coalitions (Hajer 1993) of setting agendas and influencing
agenda-setting, for example with regard to deregulation and privatization of
regulated industries and public service monopolies. The community was sub-
sequently active in correcting agenda-setting in these and many other issue
areas, for example, suggesting stronger oversight regulation in cases where
overdoses of unsupervised competition yielded disastrous results. The compre-
hensive discourse community was also able to orchestrate transnational pub-
licity and lobby campaigns, against state aid in development for example. The
community made it possible to monitor compliance with international treaty
obligations protecting property rights, and even to develop a property rights
approach allegedly to fight poverty. But members of the same community also
opposed economic approaches to environmental policy-making and continue
to attack the growing consensus on global warming (Stone 1996; Plehwe 2000;
Plehwe and Walpen 2006; Weller and Singleton 2006; Mitchell 2009; Union of
Concerned Scientists 2007; Plehwe 2008).
The academic members of the MPS have also been crucial in establishing and
promoting internationally academic (sub)disciplines such as public choice and
law and economics, disciplinary schools of thought (such as monetarism in
economics), and transdisciplinary research perspectives such as rational choice-
based neo-institutionalism. When looking at the comprehensive neoliberal
discourse community within and around the MPS we can thus also observe a
transnational community of academic intellectuals with diverse disciplinary
backgrounds, which differs from the pluralist transnational communities of
scientists and scholars who are more or less united by a common professional
understanding of scientific inquiry and disciplinary boundaries and norms
(compare Mayntz in this volume). Neoliberal scholars certainly take part and
sometimes play major roles in scientific communities, but they can and indeed
have established strong communities within such communities, even if such
invisible colleges are rarely and fully visible. To establish more precisely if and to
what extent the collaboration of intellectuals within the comprehensive neolib-
eral discourse community helped in shaping and transforming academic
321 The making of a transnational discourse community
disciplines and academic communities of scientists is one of the important
research topics for the future study of the Mont Pèlerin Society (most impor-
tantly but certainly not restricted to economics).
While all the different knowledge/power functions – initiating, innovating,
monitoring, agenda correcting, enforcing, and so on – evidenced by the
multiple involvements of neoliberal intellectuals deserve further attention,
arguably the most important function has been the social construction of
fundamental neoliberal values and principled beliefs, of a specific meaning
that has been attached to many different bits and pieces of knowledge. The
values and principled beliefs shared (in relative distance to socialism, con-
servatism, and traditional liberalism) enabled the members both collectively
and individually to develop new interpretations of economic, political, social,
and even cultural matters. While there is no such thing as a timeless and
essential neoliberal truth shared by each and every member of the neoliberal
discourse community, the range of interpretations emanating from this com-
munity is not openly pluralist either. The key strength of this comprehensive
transnational community of neoliberal intellectuals has been a conscious
nurturing of a pluralism within neoliberal confines that is still poorly under-
stood by many observers (compare Feulner 2000 on the recruitment of
different neoliberal wings of “academic” staff at the Heritage Foundation).
The neoliberal discourse community in any case can be considered
comprehensive both in terms of linking upstream (philosophical) and down-
stream (academic and policy) knowledge spheres, and in developing a wide
range of social technologies (and organizational bases) dedicated to the
advance of neoliberal agendas in many countries, discourse fields, and issue
areas. The community as a whole has mastered the art of consecutive and
parallel processing of knowledge and expertise. The establishment of partisan
think tanks such as the Foundation of Economic Education or the Institute of
Economic Affairs in London (Cockett 1994; Frost 2002) was crucial with
regard to the latter aspect, and presently several hundred neoliberal think
tanks, of which at least 150 are linked to MPS members, are globally coordi-
nated to a certain extent by the US-based Atlas Economic Research
Foundation (www.atlasusa.org) (see Plehwe and Walpen 2006).
The story of the comprehensive transnational community of neoliberal
intellectuals has long been one of a transnational community of intellectuals
and organizations. The partisan think tanks founded and run by community
members in the meantime provide for much of the longevity, stability, and
resilience of the community, which has had to weather severe storms over the
past two decades, and most recently has been declared a huge failure on
322 Dieter Plehwe
various occasions (various financial crises due to Washington Consensus
politics, Enron/Arthur Anderson, hedge fund collapses, and so on). The
current global financial and economic crisis has also rightly been blamed on
radical market recipes of neoliberal provenance. But many observers under-
estimate the staying power of the neoliberal community, which mostly
remains ill understood. Recent critiques point to a takeover of the neoliberal
community within the Mont Pèlerin Society by think tank professionals, and
use the present MPS president Depaak Lal as a case in point. Lal is presented
as someone from the Cato Institute and a radical anti-environmentalist
(Süddeutsche Zeitung 11/24/08). Alas, Depaak Lal is a regular professor at
UCLA. Although he considers eco-fundamentalists and Marxists as radical
enemies of capitalist growth, he is a highly respected academic. A think tank
professional – Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation – did indeed play a
major role as president of the MPS, but this was arguably during its most
successful period, the neoliberal heyday of the 1980s. Whether the influence of
the neoliberal community withers or not remains to be seen. Among the
solutions to the present global financial crisis advocated by important experts
and politicians the social market economy figures prominently. Unfortunately
for all who declare the neoliberal community dead, the origins of the idea of a
social market economy can be traced back to Ludwig Erhard, Alfred Müller
Armack, Wilhelm Röpke, and other German members of the Mont Pèlerin
Society (Ptak 2009). If a number of neoliberal policy projects are presently
endangered, the fundamental values and principled beliefs of the comprehen-
sive neoliberal discourse community are certainly alive and kicking.
But the current challenge to neoliberal ideas, and the recognition and
scrutiny of the “neoliberal international,” will hopefully lead to the identifica-
tion of other comprehensive transnational discourse communities, for exam-
ple, based on ecological, communitarian, or Islamic values and principled
beliefs, and possibly help to advance a comparative research agenda with an
eye to common and idiosyncratic features of comprehensive discourse com-
munities and coalitions in the present age of globalization.
NOTES
1. Critical communities represent another subtype, small groups of critical thinkers credited
with creating new ideas (Rochon 1998).
2. See the issue of Critical Sociology guest edited by Joan Roelofs, Robert Arnove, and Daniel
Faber (2007) for a number of articles that critically examine the impact of foundations on
left-wing media, think tanks, and mass movements, for example.
323 The making of a transnational discourse community
3. Security communities, as a specialized type of community of practice, were first observed by
Karl Deutsch (1957; see also Adler and Barnett 1998).
4. Raymond Aron, Marcel Bourgeois, Étienne Mantoux, Louis Marlio, Louis Rougier, and
Jacques Rueff all belonged to the French group (see Denord 2001).
5. Hayek remained unconvinced by Popper ’s advocacy of a wider pluralism (Nordmann 2005:
218). He also disregarded interventions by von Mises who objected to “interventionists”
such as Röpke and Rüstow (Walpen 2004: 100).
6. Six points were listed as worthy of further study, for example, the redefinition of the role of
the state and social minimum standards.
7. Total US membership was 437, amounting to almost half of MPS numbers (Walpen 2004:
395).
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