The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Hayek saw it, under threat: what passed as

liberalism was a travesty, a diluted and dis-

torted body of ideas corrupted by constructivist

rationalism (as opposed to what he called ‘evo-

lutionary rationalism’). The ground between

liberalism and much of what passed as Keynes-

ianism or social democracy was, on the Haye-

kian account, catastrophically slight. What was

required, as he made clear at the founding of

the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, was a

restoration, a purging of true liberalism (the

removal of ‘accretions’). There was to be no

compromise with collectivism: the seized terri-

tory had to be regained. In his writing and his

promotion of think-tanks such as the Institute

of Economic Affairs in Britain – the brains trust

for the likes of Keith Joseph and Margaret

Thatcher – Hayek aggressively launched a

cold war of ideas. He was part of the quartet

of European theorists (Carl Schmitt, Leo

Strauss and Michael Oakeshott were the

others) whose ideas, while standing in a tense

relationship to one another, have come to shape

a large swath of the intellectual landscape of the

early twenty-first century (see Anderson,

2005b). Hayek was neither a simple conserva-

tive or libertarian, nor a voice forlaissez-faire

(‘false rationalism’, as he saw it). He identified

himself with the individualist tradition of

Hume, Smith, Burke and Menger, thereby pro-

viding a bridge that linked his short-term allies

(conservatives and libertarians) to classical lib-

erals in order to make common cause against

collectivism (Gamble, 1996, p. 101). To roll

back the incursions oftaxisrequired a redesign

of thestate. A powerful chamber was to serve

as guardian of the rule of law (striking all under

45 years off the voting roll), protecting the law

of liberty from the logic of popular sovereignty.

As Anderson (2005a, p. 17) notes, the correct

Hayekian formula was ‘demarchy without

democracy’.

Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic

historian and socialist who believed that the

nineteenth-century liberal order had died,

never to be revived. By 1940, ‘every vestige’

of the international liberal order had disap-

peared, the product of the necessary adoption

of measures designed to hold off the ravages of

the self-regulating market (market despotism).

It was the conflict between the market and the

elementary requirements of an organized

social life that made some form of collectivism

or planning inevitable (Polanyi, 1944). The

liberal market order was,contraHayek, not

‘spontaneous’ but a planned development,

and its demise was the product of the market

order itself. A market order could just as well

produce the freedom to exploit as it could the

freedom of association. The grave danger, in

Polanyi’s view, was that liberal utopianism

might return in the idea of freedom as nothing

more than the advocacy of free enterprise, the

notion that planning is nothing more than ‘the

denial of freedom’ and that the justice and

liberty offered by regulation or control

becomes nothing more than ‘a camouflage of

slavery’ (1944, p. 258). Liberalism in this

account will always degenerate, ultimately

compromised by an authoritarianism that will

be invoked as a counterweight to the threat of

mass democracy. Modern capitalism con-

tained the famous ‘double-movement’, in

which markets were serially and coextensively

disembedded from, and re-embedded in,

social institutions and relations – what Polanyi

called the ‘discovery of society’. In particular,

the possibility of a counter-hegemony to the

self-regulating market could be found in resist-

ance to the commodification of the three ficti-

tious commodities (land, labour and money):

such reactions represented the spontaneous

defence of society (Burawoy, 2003).

The market and anti-market mentalities of

Hayek and Polanyi were both forged in the

context offascism, global economic depres-

sion, revolution and worldwar. To look back

on the birth ofThe great transformationand

The road to serfdomfrom the perch of 2008 is

quite salutary: we seeamerican empire(mili-

tary neo-liberalism), a global ‘war on terror’

(seeterrorism), the dominance of unfettered

global finance capital, a worldwide Muslim

resurgence, a phalanx of ‘failed states’ (other-

wise known as the failure of secular nationalist

development) and a raft of so-calledanti-

globalizationmovements, and the rise of

civic regulation. There has been, intellectually

speaking, a consequent Polanyi boom (see

Williams, 2005a) within the academy, but

fewer careful readings of the Hayekian ideas

that helped spawn these developments. From

within the bowels of this turmoil, the Haye-

kian vision is triumphant – the Liberal Inter-

national has come to pass. Its long march,

from Mont Pelerin to the collapse of the Berlin

Wall and TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’)

took about forty years and, according to

Harvey’s (2005) brief history, passed through

the Chicago Boys in Chile, the IMF/IBRD

complex, the Reagan–Thatcher revolutions

and the corporate (class) seizure of power in

the 1970s against a backdrop of declining

profitability and income share. Even if

‘global neo-liberalism’ has now assumed a

neo-conservative and military cast (Saad-Filho

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