The Clever Tropes of a Low Dishonest Decade

This is the first collection to measure the achievement of one of neoliberalism’s leading historians and critics. In a series of groundbreaking articles, Philip Mirowski and his collaborators have shown that neoliberalism, far from being a catch-all name for a globally resurgent capitalism, is, in fact, a movement driven by intellectuals and dedicated to the takeover of existing institutions. Anyone wanting to make sense of neoliberalism would do well to know who the players are and to understand how they have organized themselves. This volume builds on Mirowski’s work by putting him into conversation with scholars from outside economics and intellectual history, whose brief it is to amplify his insights, identify gaps in his arguments, and propose new lines of inquiry. The collection also contains three major new contributions by Mirowski himself: his critique of contemporary Marxism and its failure adequately to theorize neoliberalism, his lengthy review of Nancy Maclean’s much discussed Democracy in Chains, and an interview with members of the boundary 2 collective.

Contributors: David Golumbia, Annie McClanahan, Philip Mirowski, Frank Pasquale, Bruce Robbins, Christian Thorne