Liars, and tigers and chickens, oh my

It all started with an epidemic. In Sussex in 1952, foot-and-mouth disease wiped out the shorthorn cattle herd of a stockbroker-cum-gentleman farmer. The stockbroker used the government compensation to pay for a ticket to the United States, as he hoped to meet an agricultural economist in Ithaca. The economist and the stockbroker belonged to the same conservative groupuscule led by a Central European intellectual, and both wanted to contemplate new ways of spreading the latter’s vision. Cornell University had fired the economist for teaching a text by the sect’s leader, and the economist now ran a conservative foundation to propagate their creed. During his time in Ithaca with the economist, the stockbroker went on a tour of the campus, where he saw a prototype factory farm within the walls of the agricultural school crammed with some 15,000 “broiler” chickens. The stockbroker marveled at the cutting edge of agrarian capitalism; its scale made his own efforts to rear two hundred chicks (considered hubristic by his neighbours in Sussex) appear puny. Cornell’s broiler system was the fruit of ruthless selective breeding, such that the birds matured faster, carried more flesh, and endured industrial conditions that would decimate lesser breeds. The stockbroker planned to transplant the models of both the foundation and the factory farm back to England but was at a loss as to how. While blueprints for the foundation could cross borders in his briefcase, the same could not be said for the precious avian genes. To circumvent the prohibition against transporting live animals, the stockbroker wrapped two dozen eggs in decorative paper to delude customs officers into thinking they were Easter gifts. The smuggled ova soon hatched back in the United Kingdom and within half a dozen years the stockbroker owned over a million of their living descendants.Footnote ¹ By turning the erstwhile luxury good of chicken flesh into a staple, the considerably enriched stockbroker could funnel his fortune into a foundation of his own.Footnote ²

Readers may have guessed the identity of these men and their institutions. The stockbroker was Antony Fisher, an old Etonian, serial entrepreneur, and think tank impresario; his foundation, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), was the ur-organization of the now ubiquitous neoliberal think tank empire; the Central European intellectual was Friedrich Hayek; and the former Cornell economist was F. A. “Baldy” Harper, who lost his job after assigning The Road to Serfdom to students and then joined the Foundation for Economic Education. For a time, Fisher’s firm, Buxted Chickens, was the UK’s largest poultry manufacturer, boasting some of the most advanced processing plants in the world.Footnote ³ Just as Fisher mechanized the rearing and killing of chickens to achieve unprecedented economies of scale, he later experimented with the mass production of think tanks by starting the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 1981 to standardize and expedite the propagation of new institutes. Today, there are nearly six hundred Atlas-affiliated think tanks strewn across six continents. The story of Fisher and his golden eggs is well known amongst those studying the history of neoliberalism, but we retell it here to broach a discussion on the neoliberal philosophy of nature.

That members of the neoliberal thought collective had much to say about nature may come as a shock. Their economic and social policies come easily to mind, from monetarism to school vouchers, but it may be more difficult to recall their environmental ideas, apart from the bludgeons of climate denial and privatization. Yet, like the rambler who slows down and attends to her surroundings, a seemingly empty landscape can suddenly tremble with life. Fisher’s interests in environmental issues, like neoliberal work on the topic in general, tends to be ignored or dismissed as eccentric—especially his effort to farm endangered sea turtles in Grand Cayman in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Footnote ⁴ Yet animal husbandry and neoliberalism were intertwined threads in Fisher’s life’s work, with industrial slaughter serving both as a model for a risky and unstable capitalism and as a demonstration of Hayekian principles in the wild. Indeed, the first paper Fisher presented at the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) concerned the deregulation of agriculture, and Fisher’s collaborator, Oliver Smedley, led the Cheap Food League and railed against agricultural boards before helping Fisher found the IEA.Footnote ⁵ Linda Whetstone (Fisher’s daughter, precocious neoliberal pamphleteer, and future MPS president) saw the poultry industry as a model for deregulating in other agricultural sectors.Footnote ⁶ It is revealing that some of the first skirmishes fought and won by the nascent neoliberal movement were so bucolic.

As we shall see, Fisher and Whetstone’s interest in agriculture, animals, and nature more generally was widely shared by other members of the neoliberal thought collective, yet their environmental oeuvre remains little researched despite the blossoming of neoliberalism studies in recent years.Footnote ⁷ We understand that readers may protest this claim. After all, is there not an abundant scholarship on carbon-credit markets, biodiversity offsets, privatized conservation, individual transfer quotas, greenwashing, and related topics? Are there not umpteen books and articles titled some variation of “neoliberal nature”?Footnote ⁸ It is true that such scholarship exists, but we counter that much of it concerns neoliberal policies rather than ideas.Footnote ⁹ Focusing on how the neoliberal thought collective conceives and transmits ideas distinguishes the coterie clustered around Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen and their followers since the late 1990s from other scholars who have studied neoliberalism.Footnote ¹⁰ This framework privileges debates within the inner sanctum of the neoliberal movement, the MPS, and traces how concepts emerge and are transmitted through its institutional thicket of think tanks and university departments into broader society. Over the last quarter-century, Plehwe and Walpen’s multidisciplinary endeavor has inspired countless scholars to study how neoliberals concieve the international order, human rights, economic zones, the family, imperialism, and many other subjects.Footnote ¹¹

While Plehwe and Walpen’s approach has influenced the course of neoliberalism studies, their anchor concept of “thought collective” has been contested. Some critics argue that the term suggests a greater coherence and coordination within neoliberalism than actually exists—a charge that, when taken too far, risks implying the existence of a centrally orchestrated conspiracy.Footnote ¹² Recently, Plehwe diplomatically staked out the middle ground in such debates by shifting to using the term in the plural to represent how neoliberalism emerged not as a single coherent formation but as a heterogeneous constellation of overlapping intellectual networks.Footnote ¹³ If Ludwig Fleck’s conception of the “thought collective” presumes excessive internal coherence, then, Plehwe argues, it must be complemented by Karl Mannheim’s more flexible notion of a shared Weltanschauung capable of accommodating dissent, variation, and historical change. Speaking of neoliberal thought collectives—ordoliberals, Austrians, Chicago and Virginia schoolmen, and so on—better captures both their common orientation and their internal tensions. This allows contradictions to be analyzed without reducing neoliberalism to a monolithic entity and foregrounds how ideas are recombined across socioeconomic contexts rather than traced through narrow intellectual pedigrees. When we take the thought-collective approach, it becomes clear that the neoliberal environmental corpus is largely unified by a shared commitment to Hayek’s belief that the market was akin to a “system of telecommunications,” but members of various neoliberal schools disagreed on how this principle was to be applied in practice.Footnote ¹⁴ These differences engendered a range of strategies, institutional designs, and policy prescriptions, contributing to the richness of neoliberal environmental thought. Our forum is greatly influenced by Plehwe and Walpen’s thought-collective approach and indeed it should be seen as a selion abutting the broader field of neoliberalism studies.

We believe our forum makes a novel contribution to neoliberalism studies because its scholars have hitherto rarely inquired what a neoliberal philosophy of nature might entail. This lacuna is surprising given that it represents the concatenation of two great trends of the past half-century—the destabilization of the Earth system and ascendance of neoliberal hegemony. When scholars have turned to neoliberal thought, they have largely focused on climate denial.Footnote ¹⁵ While we accept that denial certainly matters, we would add that it should be placed in context with other neoliberal tactics and concepts. Perhaps the urgency of sawing through the trunk of denialism has led scholars to overlook the breadth and intricacy of the many branches of environmental thought above their heads. A rare exception to this tendency was Philip Mirowski’s “red guide to the neoliberal playbook” on climate change, where he portrayed denial as a short-term tactic to buy time for the medium-term approach of cap-and-trade programs and, in the long run, geoengineering.Footnote ¹⁶ Few, however, have tried to fill in Mirowski’s sketch, while the cottage industry on denial continues to churn out publications.Footnote ¹⁷ We imagine that a scholar working on denial might retort much the same way as a geographer studying the effects of biodiversity offsets on an ecosystem—why should one care how neoliberals think about nature when one could better understand how they affect it?Footnote ¹⁸ In short, why take the time to reconstruct neoliberal environmental frameworks when the world is on fire?Footnote ¹⁹ We see three reasons why neoliberal environmental thought matters—or, in Hayekian terms, why our current ignorance is not optimal.

Dangerous daydreams

First, studying neoliberal environmental thought can shed light on their past and pending long-term strategies. For example, scholars have puzzled over why so many cap-and-trade markets provide few ecological benefits or economic profit.Footnote ²⁰ This outcome does not necessarily mean that neoliberal environmental frameworks have failed; rather, as Mirowski noted years ago, some of these cap-and-trade markets were never meant to work. Instead they were “an elaborate bait-and-switch, where political actors originally bent upon using state power to curb emissions are instead diverted into endless technicalities of the institution and maintenance of novel markets for carbon permits.”Footnote ²¹ One can detect a similar logic animating cap-and-trade programs for fisheries, which succeeded in obviating bans on deep-water trawling rather than helping cold-water coral and sponge biomes to actually recover.Footnote ²² We might, tongue in cheek, distinguish between a Catholic interest in acts (i.e. if cap-and-trade fails, then the neoliberals have failed) and a Protestant interest in faith (i.e. such failures help achieve more profound Hayekian aims).

The neoliberals’ long-term plans may be too abstruse or too ambitious to apprehend piecemeal and instead the constellation of neoliberal frameworks must be grasped in their unity to see how they reinforce each other. Thanks to Julian Simon’s framework of “resourceship,” neoliberals cultivated a precocious interest in nonconventional fossil fuels in the 1980s, readying them for the boom two decades later.Footnote ²³ By contrast, many environmentalists were caught off guard or embraced fracked methane as a “bridge fuel” to nowhere.Footnote ²⁴ Recent debates over geoengineering—a cornucopian technology par excellence—have followed a similar pattern.Footnote ²⁵ Which other madcap schemes of today may become common sense tomorrow may be unclear, but contemporary neoliberals conjure novel frameworks at a brisk pace, such as the recent suggestion of “interspecies money.”Footnote ²⁶ Limited attention to neoliberals’ long-term goals too often contributes to the failure and fragmentation of resistance, or, worse still, to co-optation, as the opposition to neoliberalism imbibes its enemy’s frameworks.

Hence the second argument for our research program—the need to inoculate oneself against unknowingly adopting green Hayekianism. Mirowski’s dictum in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is: “know your enemy before you start daydreaming of a better world.”Footnote ²⁷ Our advice is even simpler: know thyself because your daydreams might belong to your enemy. Contrary to the assumption that neoliberals offer little more than the cynicism of denial, neoliberal concepts can be found throughout the theoretical repertoires of environmentalists across the political spectrum. Much of socialist and anarchist thought today is divided between the Lilliputian panacea of the “commons” and a Promethean faith in high technology to cure what ails the Earth system. Within the former camp, it is rarely acknowledged that Elinor Ostrom, the shepherdess of the commons, worked within a Hayekian intellectual tradition shaped by the debates over suburban white flight and austerity in the global South following the 1980s debt crisis.Footnote ²⁸ It is equally bizarre that David Harvey, the doyen of Marxist geography, approvingly cited Simon in the 1990s to dismiss the claims of eco-Cassandras. This problem continues to the present as contemporary socialists pen panegyrics to cap-and-trade, geoengineering, and asteroid mining.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, animal ethicists frequently cite Tyler Cowen’s work on the “predation problem” (i.e. whether animal predation is an ethical problem) without pondering his neoliberal bona fides.Footnote ³⁰

Other scholars have also consciously or unconsciously adopted neoliberal precepts, influencing the course of great rivers of scholarship. In his beloved classic The Fisherman’s Problem, Arthur McEvoy constructs his institutionalist analysis by drawing on neoliberal economists Ronald Coase, H. S. Gordon, and Anthony Scott.Footnote ³¹ Paul Sabin wrote a whole book on the rivalry between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, yet he never once mentions “neoliberalism” and instead vaguely defines Simon as a “conservative intellectual.”Footnote ³² By failing to take ideology seriously, Sabin arrives at the conclusion that environmentalists should find the middle ground between Simon and Ehrlich to restore the halcyon days of the early 1970s when environmental issues were not politically polarized. STS scholarship similarly draws on Coasean institutionalism, as in the case of Michael Callon’s “hot” and “cold” frames (based on transaction costs): perhaps this explains why Callon and his followers uncritically study neoliberal initiatives, such as privatizing the radio spectrum and cap-and-trade programs for fisheries.Footnote ³³ The prominence of such ideas reflects not only the efficacy of the neoliberal thought collective in proliferating its agenda, but also gaps within radical scholarly traditions that are too easily filled by Hayekian common sense.

The creeping neoliberalization of the landscape of environmental thought leads us to our third argument: studying the neoliberal philosophy of nature allows scholars to engage with a rather creative and eclectic tradition. Given the difficulty of ejecting the neoliberal irritant already inside this body of thought, how might it be coated with nacre to make it harmless or even beautiful? One can appreciate the craftsmanship of many neoliberal frameworks. Dales, for instance, stitched together cap-and-trade by borrowing concepts from the left-wing jurist Charles Reich (author of a paean to hippiedom, The Greening of America), while Coase was inspired by progressive jurist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, as well as socialists Maurice Dobb, and Vladimir Lenin.Footnote ³⁴ Learning from neoliberals is not inherently a Faustian undertaking—they themselves, after all, absorb ideas from the left—but such borrowing must be carried out carefully.Footnote ³⁵ What does an Ostromian theory of the commons look like stripped of its reactionary postulates? Appraising neoliberalism’s theoretical depth and organizational breadth encourages one to help construct a countervailing apparatus of commensurate sophistication. The first step to emulating the neoliberals’ success, however, requires accepting that neoliberalism exists and that its frameworks are far more widespread than has previously been acknowledged. Nor are historians somehow insulated from the object they study because of Hayek’s rancour against a discipline that decried the plight of the British working class during the Industrial Revolution.Footnote ³⁶ Other neoliberals continued Hayek’s project of disciplining history to pay homage to the market’s glory, first via cliometrics and then via Coasean institutionalism.Footnote ³⁷ Retooling our discipline in an age of environmental collapse and neoliberal might means rethinking our activity as scholars and political subjects. Hayek, after all, epitomized the amalgam of scholarship and tireless activism.Footnote ³⁸

A fallow field

Where might a history of neoliberal environmental thought begin? One project could trace how Coasean institutionalism was adopted by various neoliberal schools and repurposed to fit their interests and approaches. For example, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Montana is perhaps the best-known bastion of neoliberal environmental thought, though scholars tend to reduce its brand of “free-market environmentalism” to little more than an ardor for privatization and an animus against the state.Footnote ³⁹ While such a characterization is not wrong per se, it overlooks PERC’s far more creative effort to rewrite the environmental history of the US West. Its in-house think-tankers and their fellow travelers studied Indigenous property regimes, debated the economic efficiency of homesteading, and ruminated on the bison’s demise.Footnote ⁴⁰ If one leaps from Montana to Virginia, it is possible to trace how James Buchanan and his colleagues incorporated Coasean institutionalism into public-choice theory.Footnote ⁴¹ Buchanan is rarely seen as an environmental thinker, yet he wrote about behavioral economics and pollution, externalities, public utilities, and agricultural economics.Footnote ⁴² His theory of “club goods”—a reference to country clubs—was an important influence on Ostrom’s commons. Nor was Buchanan’s interest in environmental issues unusual in his milieu. Fellow public-choice theorist Gordon Tullock, for instance, wrote a book on eusocial insects.Footnote ⁴³

Another subject ripe for historical study is the relationship between neoliberalism and neo-Malthusianism during the last four decades of the twentieth century. While some neoliberals, such as Simon, vociferously attacked the “doomsters,” others indulged in the group’s predilection for borrowing from a vibrant, albeit hostile, intellectual tendency. Ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke dismissed apocalyptic neo-Malthusianism, as if population growth were subject to an unyielding natural law; however, he did engage with what he called “analytic Malthusianism,” which concerned the moral aspects of population growth.Footnote ⁴⁴ He warned that if humanity did not take action soon, the world would transform into a hellish anthill amidst natural devastation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Jack Hirschleifer, Gary Becker, Don Lavoie, and other neoliberals were keen to draw on E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology to augment their theoretical repertoire.Footnote ⁴⁶ In National Economic Planning, Lavoie Hayekianizes Wilson’s insects, so that the ant colony can be understood as a complex system with knowledge dispersed amongst its myriad members.Footnote ⁴⁷ PERC’s John Baden championed the work of Garrett Hardin and coedited a volume with him.Footnote ⁴⁸ Perhaps no one personifies the neoliberals’ ambivalence towards political biology better than Hayek himself, who enthusiastically applauded Simon’s salvos against the neo-Malthusians, while also adopting some of the latter’s arguments to defend the market order. In his final work, The Fatal Conceit, he turned the logic of limits on its head to claim that the market was the only institution able to support an excessively fecund humanity—its absence would “condemn millions to starvation.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks in this new subfield is disentangling the skein of neoliberal and libertarian environmental concepts. The labor carried out by Plehwe and his collaborators in the first two decades of neoliberalism studies helped distinguish that creed from libertarianism, but political events in recent years have forced scholars to nuance this complex relationship of collaboration and rivalry.Footnote ⁵⁰ One of the most important libertarian theorists was Murray Rothbard, a sort of conservative Apep, who had worked closely with the MPS before breaking with the group in the 1960s. Rothbard’s concept of “homesteading” differed from PERC’s formulation and was explicitly intended as a counterweight to Coase’s dominance in neoliberal environmental thought. Rothbard argued that the first settlers in a region enjoyed the prerogative to emit pollution that later arrivals were obliged to endure.Footnote ⁵¹ Rothbard’s right of the first blight has been deployed by libertarians to lambast Coasean and Ostromian environmental frameworks, yet the relationship between the two camps is not unremittingly cantankerous.Footnote ⁵² Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri is an arch-libertarian advocate of “sea-steading” as a means of founding new nations.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, neoliberals within the MPS orbit have unashamedly borrowed homesteading as the theoretical bedrock for their fantasies of privatizing outer space. To expand beyond Earth’s limits, space is envisioned as a much-needed frontier for both neoliberals and libertarians, to which the market can escape and thus evade both the green Leviathan and a dying planet.Footnote ⁵⁴

Much could be written on neoliberal approaches to energy issues. In the 1990s, G. C. Watkins criticized “Hotelling’s rule” (i.e. the belief that market prices could efficiently guide the drawdown of a nonrenewable resource) on epistemological grounds. He reasoned that future technological developments were unpredictable, and thus it made little sense to talk about firms owning fixed deposits that they would exploit in predictable ways.Footnote ⁵⁵ That same decade, Exxon financed research by Daniel Kahneman and his peers to demonstrate the irrationality of juries in assessing punitive damages, and thus minimize its legal losses following the Exxon Valdez disaster.Footnote ⁵⁶ Shamelessly, Kahneman recounted in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow an experiment in which participants estimated their “willingness to pay” to prevent an oil spill killing 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds, an amount that budged little for each logarithmic leap (respectively, $80, $78, and $88).Footnote ⁵⁷ If Watkins argued that firms could not know the Earth’s limits but instead must blindly adhere to the market’s mercurial signals, then Kahneman claimed that individuals could not know how they themselves felt about the Earth’s destruction. According to the market’s metrics, natural resources were nigh unlimited, while the wells of sympathy were nearly dry.

As Kahneman’s death-coated fowl, Lavoie’s cooperative ants, and Tullock’s utility-maximizing coal tits remind us, one cannot delve deep into neoliberal environmental thought before entering a veritable menagerie. Surprisingly, PERC’s interest in the near demise of the bison does not represent the only instance of neoliberal scholarship on extinction, because Vernon Smith wrote an article on the controversial extinction of megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene.Footnote ⁵⁸ One wonders to what degree Hayek was influenced by the work of his good friend Konrad Lorenz, let alone his own father and grandfather, who were amateur naturalists.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, Hayek was unusual amongst economists for turning to biology rather than physics as a storehouse of metaphors, calling the market a “highly complicated organism” whose workings were beyond human comprehension.Footnote ⁶⁰ If we return to the story near the beginning of this article, we can follow the thread from Fisher’s seemingly bizarre foray into turtle farming to the practice of rewilding today. Contemporary environmentalists assailed Fisher’s farm and did him no favors by supporting the US Endangered Species Act in 1973, which closed the most lucrative market for chelonian steaks. Today, however, many rewilding projects marry the exotic ranch selling bison burgers and aurochs T-bones with eco-tourism and perhaps some carbon credits.Footnote ⁶¹ Rewilders may hardly be card-carrying Hayekians, but their newfound acumen for business reflects a broader change in the intellectual climate since the 1970s.Footnote ⁶²

If, as we proposed in the previous section, neoliberals could inspire novel ways of combining exegesis with organization, then the handful of ecologically minded post-neoliberals could serve as helmsmen steering political philosophy through and beyond the straits of neoliberalism. The chameleonic John Gray was once an ardent Thatcherite but lost his faith in the market’s omniscience long ago. He maintained, however, a Hayekian misanthropy grounded in humanity’s irredeemable ignorance, to which he added Daoism (as hinted by the title of his best-selling Straw Dogs) and contempt for the “superstition” of progress.Footnote ⁶³ Gray concurs with Hayek’s efforts to reduce the exceptionality of human consciousness, leaving Homo sapiens no different from other animals and thus displaying little of the “species-narcissism” prevalent in other liberal traditions as well as in Marxism.Footnote ⁶⁴ If humans were not a uniquely rational species, then Gray reasoned that little justified unequal treatment of other animals. He abjured, however, Hayek’s faith in progress—a synonym for the market’s expansion—leaving him with a strange antihumanist nihilism and empathy for animals. This, perhaps, could be a starting point of sorts.

A similar but more eccentric trajectory was undertaken by DiZerega, a political scientist, a “Gardnerian witch” (whatever that is) and a former friend of Charles Koch.Footnote ⁶⁵ His post-neoliberalism is predicated on his critique of Hayek for failing to consider nature as a “spontaneous order” equal to or even more complex than the market.Footnote ⁶⁶ For DiZerega, the question of politics today is how to manage the relations amongst three catallaxies (i.e. the market, nature, and democracy), rather than feeding the latter two to the maw of the market. The works of both Gray and DiZerega hint at how to encompass the nimbleness of Hayekian epistemology, an anti-humanist break with the Enlightenment, and the complexity of the Earth system, without paying obeisance to Moloch, whose blood is running money. They may provide some much-needed inspiration to a liberatory project of post-neoliberalism that is far from complete.

Environmental neoliberal thought collectives

Thus far we have attempted to adumbrate the history of neoliberal environmental thought as it currently stands and speculated how it might develop. This endeavour has been much augmented by our newfound collaborators who have contributed to this forum. We began, back in 2022, with a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and then the following year at University College in Oxford. We have offered three reasons to study neoliberal environmental thought: to better perceive and thwart neoliberal objectives, to guard oneself against Hayekian daydreams, and to engage fruitfully with the work of a worthy adversary to better construct post-neoliberal frameworks and intellectual infrastructure. We are both proud and inspired that the contributions collected for this forum further this agenda.

What unites the contributions to this forum is an approach that treats neoliberal environmental thought as a bricolage of frameworks concocted by the thought collective rather than a single doctrine. While neoliberal thinkers were broadly committed to the market as the best way to concentrate and represent information, the articles collected here show that this commitment generated a diverse range of approaches, institutional experiments, and political strategies. Taken together, the contributions examine how environmental problems were framed as epistemic and intellectual challenges—above all, as questions of knowledge, order, and coordination. As the forum demonstrates, these ideas emerged in specific historical contexts, evolved through debate and institutionalization, and were repeatedly repurposed for political use, revealing neoliberal environmental thought as both conceptually diverse and historically dynamic.

Isabel Oakes surveys ordoliberal environmental thought and argues that nature acts as an adhesive binding various components of the group’s worldview. Oakes’s interpretation differs from the recent efflorescence of scholarship, as few have paid attention to green aspects of ordoliberal thought.Footnote ⁶⁷ This absence in the scholarly literature is unusual given that political parties in recent years have jostled for the mantle of ordoliberalism to legitimize their green policies, from feed-in tariffs to emissions-trading schemes.Footnote ⁶⁸ The broad but shallow consensus on ordoliberalism in German politics today is only made possible by forgetting its origins in conservative milieus during the interwar period. First-generation ordoliberals appear green because they criticized biodiversity loss, pollution, urban squalor, and other environmental problems that followed in the wake of industrialization and proposed restoring society to a human scale through what they called “vitalist politics” (Vitalpolitik). In many ways, this concept serves as a linchpin for ordoliberalism, since a return to a smaller scale would allow nature to recover, which in turn would transform unruly proletarians into responsible small property owners with gardens of their own. Ordoliberals idealized Switzerland as a clean, conservative society unburdened by class division.Footnote ⁶⁹ Ironically, little of the ordos’ Vitalpolitik was implemented during the apex of their influence in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Wirtschaftswunder trampled their fantasy of a petit bourgeois idyll. Not only does the continued dominance of ordoliberalism in German environmental debates forestall the emergence of more radical approaches, but its seeming quaintness—idyllischer Gartenzwergkapitalismus—acts as a green amber encasing the Vernunftrepublikanerismus of the Weimar Republic.

Gareth Dale’s article, “Of Bees and the Garden: Natural and Human Orders in Mandeville and Hayek,” would perhaps be the most recognizable to those familiar with the historiography on neoliberal environmental thought, as scholars have long focused on Hayek’s interest in social evolution. Hayek idiosyncratically credited the intellectual lineage of cultural evolution less to Charles Darwin than to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and Anglo-Dutch satirist Bernard Mandeville. In his article, Dale meticulously examines what exactly Hayek gleaned from Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, while also exploring how Hayek invented a tradition to obscure the novelty of his arguments. Dale stresses, however, the overlap between the two thinkers’ frameworks, especially Mandeville’s precocious embrace of what Dale calls a “growth ideology” that legitimated luxurious consumption by the elite. Centuries later, Hayek would wholeheartedly inherit this dogma. Dale makes two related interventions that are especially innovative. First, he puts actual bees in his history and thus takes seriously the fable’s entomological aspects rather than seeing the comparison purely as a literary conceit. Second, he examines his subjects’ interest in the animal question and finds “the gap that Mandeville [and Hayek] draws between lower-class humans and the animals is narrower than that between the two classes [of rich and poor].” Dale’s article shows how Hayek’s relation to liberalism as well as to animals rewards careful attention.

Johannes Lundberg’s analysis of neoliberal financial theory and fossil-fuel divestment campaigns perhaps most directly lends its shoulder to fighting neoliberal efforts today.Footnote ⁷⁰ He reconstructs the emergence of a distinctly Hayekian approach to finance at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, which led to the “efficient-market hypothesis,” as well as adopting and expanding the already existing “prudent-person principle.” Lundberg adroitly traces the development of these ideas from graduate student papers written in Hyde Park in the 1950s, to their codification in US law in the 1970s, and their transplantation to the European Union in the 1990s. As is so often the case, these concepts were not self-evident propositions that sprang fully formed Athena-like from Hayek’s forehead, but, as Lundberg shows, were the result of intense debates within the neoliberal thought collective. At first, these concepts helped weaken the power of unions and pensioners to control their own plans, while strengthening the hand of fund managers. That neoliberals could then redeploy these concepts in the context of climate change debates demonstrates their flexibility, but also the benefit of having an extensive theoretical panoply one can draw on when necessary. Lundberg brings his narrative up to the present by showing how the concepts he analyzed hindered the climate campaign in which he participated. The case of neoliberal financial theory shows how de facto denialism can take finer forms beyond crass obstructionism, for why would neoliberals rely solely on vulgar arguments for inaction when more elegant ones are at hand?

Like Lundberg, Joshua Rossetti is interested in how ideas are disseminated through neoliberal networks, but the latter focuses more on the instrument than on the music. Rossetti examines how the Fraser Institute emerged in Vancouver almost eight thousand kilometers away from its maternal institution in London and how the British Columbian business elite, fearing the new provincial left-wing government, reached out to Fisher and proposed setting up a think tank. The province’s timber barons and their hireling economists at first had no real acquaintance with neoliberal principles and needed tutelage by members of the thought collective. This instilled a puissant class consciousness and cultivated a new neoliberal cadre capable of assisting the growth of a new tentacle of Fisher’s think tank octopus. Rossetti places these organizational experiments within the context of British Columbia’s shift from a highly unionized extractive economy to a financialized and individualist one. This transition was accelerated by the privatization of the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation, an experiment proposed by the Fraser Institute, where every adult in the province was given a share. The ensuing speculative frenzy ended in financial disaster, but did not discredit a new subjectivity that turned, as Rossetti observes, “everyone into a capitalist … reshaping the way they related to the province’s natural environment.” Rossetti’s work provides a model for tracing the development and implementation of neoliberal ideas through the Atlas Network, emphasizing the importance for scholars to study nodes of this network beyond the usual litany of Chicago, Freiburg, Charlottesville, and Vienna.

The complexity of relations between neoliberal intellectuals and their capitalist paymasters is also the subject of Lars Cornelissen’s novel narrative on the origin of climate denial, as other scholars privilege corporate scientists as the purveyors of untruths rather than Hayekian intellectuals. Although executives at Exxon and MPS boffins may share the same end of undermining climate mitigation, they harbored differing motivations. Cornelissen focuses on a single thinker, Deepak Lal, a British Indian economist, a consummate MPS insider, and one of the first neoliberals to delineate a denialist framework. In 1989, he gave the Wincott Lecture on “The Limits of International Co-operation,” where he outlined one of the first neoliberal responses to climate change. For Lal, climate change was not a problem of profitability, but of international order. He warned that “internalising this externality [i.e. climate change], could require a world central plan imposed by a world government.” Such a global environmental authority would represent “eco-imperialism” because it would doom the global South to penury by withholding the fruits of fossil capital. Like many subsequent neoliberal pronouncements on climate change, a Janus-faced Lal both denied the science of climate change and concomitantly argued that even if climate change were real the market should not be shackled.Footnote ⁷¹ Lal’s variation on this soon clichéd approach was that climate change was not anthropomorphic but caused by sun spots and, in any case, it was an innocuous phenomenon.Footnote ⁷² Given, as we noted above, the importance of denialism in the extant scholarship on neoliberal environmental thought, we would be remiss not to include a discussion on the topic, but Cornelissen demonstrates how the methods of intellectual history yield new insights from a topic as well studied as this.

Of all the contributions in this forum, Madeleine Baker’s article on “job-killing regulation” cuts through the insulation historians often enjoy when studying their subjects, because neoliberals are not only aware of that seemingly obscure branch of knowledge, historiography, but have long sought to reshape it into a form of market hagiography. This breaking of the fourth wall reminds historians that we too have to follow neoliberals beyond hermeneutics and into the real world of politics and the thought-worlds of other intellectual cultures. The titular quote of Baker’s article dates to a speech given by Ronald Reagan in 1979, but Baker places what seems to be superficial sloganeering into the context of neoliberal hatred of mid-century historians who exposed the miseries engendered by the Industrial Revolution. To challenge this consensus, Hayek edited Capitalism and the Historians, which shone a benign light on the laissez-faire era of British capitalism. While the volume was met with a muted reception amongst historians, the economic turmoil of the 1970s offered more fertile conditions for the neoliberal–libertarian crusade against what Ayn Rand christened the “anti-industrial revolution.” As Baker carefully shows, it was not immediately obvious to contemporaries a half-century ago that new environmental regulations entailed trade-offs with unemployment. This formula only became common sense through the concerted effort of breaking a nascent environmentalist–trade unionist coalition, undermining academic history, and intimidating regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carla Ibled’s article examines how neoliberals in recent decades have launched their environmental frameworks into the domain of space commercialization. American and British neoliberal think-tankers have reframed outer space not merely as a technological frontier but also as an institutional laboratory where their ambitious projects can unfold unencumbered by the political constraints of terrestrial sovereignty. Ibled explores how libertarian thinkers, drawing on Murray Rothbard’s homesteading principle, defend a “first in use, first in right” claim to extraterrestrial land and resources—effectively expanding the logic of the frontier onto a cosmic scale. Mining asteroids, terraforming Mars, or exporting pollution off-world are cast as rational market solutions rather than political choices, often buoyed by Julian Simon’s blithe optimism regarding how the boundless resources (both terrestrial and interplanetary) and human ingenuity could be orchestrated by the market. Ibled’s analysis shows that libertarianism operates less as an external radical fringe than as a cutting edge of conservative economics, as neoliberal and libertarian ideologues share a hostility to “collectivist” international law, a fixation on private property, and a faith in entrepreneurial solutions to environmental problems. Ibled thus demonstrates how neoliberal environmental thought does not simply respond to ecological crisis but often displaces it, relocating the problem to questions of institutional design and property regimes while imagining new frontiers for market expansion. Her contribution reinforces the forum’s broader claim that neoliberal environmentalism operates as a flexible and historically adaptive thought collective, capable of rearticulating its core commitments to the free market even in the most speculative of settings.

The monster at our door

Antony Fisher’s career in factory farming ended as it began, with a plague. An epidemic decimated his innumerable chickens in 1965, thirteen years after foot-and-mouth disease ravaged his cattle herd. His firm survived the catastrophe, but his heart was no longer in it and he sold Buxted Chickens in 1968 for £21 million (equivalent to £324 million in 2026), pocketing £2 million for himself.Footnote ⁷³ Neoliberalism helped usher in the epochal shift of factory farming, an endeavor so immense that the bones of broiler chickens—animals that vastly outnumber all wild avifauna—have been proposed as a marker in the fossil record for the Anthropocene.Footnote ⁷⁴ Avian influenza, once a mild illness for its hosts, since the onset of factory farming has become increasingly lethal, first to birds and then, after the virus crossed the species barrier in 1997, to humans.Footnote ⁷⁵ Six years later, when avian flu broke out again, the most troubling death was that of a Thai mother who contracted the disease from her sick daughter—the first instance of intra-human transmission. The threat of a major pandemic seemed imminent, inspiring Marxist historian Mike Davis to quickly pen The Monster at Our Door, where he analyzed how capitalism both made zoonoses more likely and discouraged investment in life-saving vaccines.Footnote ⁷⁶

What neoliberals made of this looming threat attracted less attention than Davis’s eschatological analysis. Tyler Cowen, contemporary neoliberalism’s public pugilist in the mould of Milton Friedman, counseled against annulling patents on essential medicines (because “confiscating property rights would reduce the incentive for innovation the next time around”), supported “decentralized responses” over having federal governments take the lead, and opposed quarantines.Footnote ⁷⁷ (Notably, such advice is not dissimilar from the neoliberal approach to climate change.) Given how recent the events were, there is little need to detail the neoliberals’ dangerous insouciance in the face of mass death.Footnote ⁷⁸ There is little popular awareness, however, that humanity is likely on the cusp of a much more severe avian flu pandemic. The latest avian flu outbreak, which began in 2020, has continued much longer than previous outbreaks because mass culls have failed to bring it to a close. It is likely that the virus has evolved to achieve mammal-to-mammal transmission for the first time, possibly amongst sea lions, as well as farmed mink and cattle.Footnote ⁷⁹ The hatching of “mutant neoliberalism,” as the mountain-born creed becomes deformed by its dalliance with the swamp dwellers of fascism and libertarianism, makes the spectre of avian flu somehow even more apocalyptic.Footnote ⁸⁰

Long histories of neoliberal reform and the hollowing out of democratic contestation have themselves fostered the forces that now claim to oppose the neoliberal status quo, prompting the question whether these movements will undo market-centered governance or simply reshape it in new directions. What looks like rupture may instead be transformation from within: the contemporary far right often emerges not as an external antagonist but as a distorted continuation of neoliberal logics, intensifying rather than abandoning them. The second Trump administration epitomizes the bizarre relationship between libertarians, fascists, and neoliberals. Their goals sometimes concur, as in the attempted destruction of the crown jewel of American public health, the National Institutes of Health, and the withdrawal from the World Health Organization, while the rescission of mandates for vaccines and pasteurization is a farcical echo of neoliberal disdain for the regulation of food and pharmaceuticals. Raw cow’s milk, the fascist drink of choice to rival Fanta, will likely prove a vector of transmission when the virus finally mutates, but perhaps there is no point crying over milk spillover. Recall that SARS-CoV-2’s initial case mortality was 1 percent, while avian flu ranges from 10 to 50 percent.Footnote ⁸¹

It is hardly obvious which crisis will strike first or hardest—another pandemic, the deterioration of the Earth system, a geopolitical crisis sparked by geoengineering, or a fascist Machtergreifung. At a much more minor scale, there is also the decline of our discipline and of the humanities in general as the neoliberalization of the academy trundles forward. Neoliberalism is perhaps less a monster at history’s door than an irritating homunculus and thus it may seem an inauspicious moment to call for the formation of a new subfield. We are not as optimistic as some colleagues who believe that history can have “agency” or that we can “help” the fight against climate change alongside more practical disciplines, but studying neoliberalism has shown us that the relationship between academic knowledge and the world of politics is far from straightforward.Footnote ⁸² In recent decades, scholarship has produced two vast literatures—one on neoliberalism, the other on the environmental crisis—yet the connections between them remain incomplete. The history of neoliberal environmental thought functions as a conduit between these bodies of knowledge, helping to trace how ideas were incubated, standardized, and ultimately scaled up, much as the chicken was transformed from a heterogeneous barnyard creature into a uniform unit of industrial production.

While many of us in this forum are predisposed towards a materialist understanding of history, we also believe that ideas matter. Fisher’s efforts to farm green turtles foundered because contemporary conservationists were appalled by his scheme, offering him little succor when the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973.Footnote ⁸³ Two years later, a ruined Fisher sold his reptilian abattoir for a song.Footnote ⁸⁴ Whether or not environmentalists think that endangered animals should be sold for their shell and soup, let alone other commodities, is ultimately an intellectual and ethical issue that determine which policies are adopted. While we in no way endorse “doomerism,” at least environmentalists in the “Malthusian moment” of the 1960s and 1970s had a worldview that was not riddled with neoliberal delusions.Footnote ⁸⁵ Neoliberals were caught off guard by the neo-Malthusians’ ephemeral ascendancy, and redoubled their efforts to make their own environmental frameworks to forestall a green state from throttling the market.Footnote ⁸⁶ This project has turned out to be very successful, and within a decade neoliberal concepts began to percolate into the environmental movement. Similarly, swathes of history, STS, and radical theory fell under neoliberal suzerainty.

By examining neoliberal environmental reasoning, new post-neoliberal approaches can imitate that tradition’s eclecticism and depth, while paying heed to ecological stability, animal liberation, and the democratic ideal of self-government. We are not presumptuous enough to think that starting a new subfield of neoliberal environmental thought would suffice to undermine neoliberal hegemony. Historians may assist in chiselling a few fragments off the columns upholding its increasingly fissured dominance, likely at a modest pace compared to the renovation carried out by sledgehammer-wielding libertarians and fascists. Chipping away through scholarship only makes sense if historians belong to a broader coalition both within and beyond the academy. Still, understanding neoliberal environmental philosophy can do much to understand why society’s conception of nature has changed so drastically since the 1980s and how it might change again. The history of neoliberalism, after all, shows how a small group of intellectuals can indeed change the course of history.