by From Lukas Bäuerle and PNLE The most powerful and at the same time dangerous aspect of neoliberal thought is its conception of economic reality as governed by a separate sphere of absolute truths. In aligning with a long-standing tradition of perennial philosophies (lat. perennis: constant, lasting), neoliberalism has set out to reconfigure our world according to an image that was dead from the very outset. The myth neoliberalism is operating on philosophically is the idea of a world of hidden truths and principles behind the ambiguous and chaotic phenomena we are experiencing in daily life. There is a logic behind the chaos, reigning independently of time and space. This proposition is not just “talk” – it is a deep-seated ontological frame of contemporary economic thought that
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from Lukas Bäuerle and PNLE
The most powerful and at the same time dangerous aspect of neoliberal thought is its conception of economic reality as governed by a separate sphere of absolute truths. In aligning with a long-standing tradition of perennial philosophies (lat. perennis: constant, lasting), neoliberalism has set out to reconfigure our world according to an image that was dead from the very outset. The myth neoliberalism is operating on philosophically is the idea of a world of hidden truths and principles behind the ambiguous and chaotic phenomena we are experiencing in daily life. There is a logic behind the chaos, reigning independently of time and space. This proposition is not just “talk” – it is a deep-seated ontological frame of contemporary economic thought that has found its way into the discipline’s textbooks and, hence, has to be learnt by millions of students around the globe semester after semester (i.e. in Mankiw, 2021, 2ff.). “Stop engaging with reality and start thinking about economic laws working behind the curtains” is what students face but a lot of them intuitively reject (Pühringer and Bäuerle, 2019).
The power of neoliberal thought, then, lies with conquering the public imagination through institutionalized impact and installing the fixed imagery of a narrowly interpreted “Market Mechanism” working miraculously backstage in the theatre of social reality.
