Is Viridiana Jones to blame for her befuddlement concerning what has happened to her profession and her university over the course of her lifetime? By and large, I would be inclined to say no. Existing analyses of the commercialization of science and the transformation of the university on the part of economists, philosophers, sociologists and science studies scholars have left much to be desired, to put it politely. One of the stranger recent developments has been the performance of a small number of econometric exercises by economists to supposedly quantify the extent of harm done to science by certain aspects of the modern commercial regime. The barely concealed presumption that economists just naturally know how science works, and that the marginal costs of the minor inconveniences of privatization could be captured by before-and-after citation analyses of patent-publication pairs, is a symptom of just how far the ability to think clearly about the issues has atrophied. The capacity to conceptualize solid bases of comparison between the two qualitatively different science regimes is just one of the points sorely neglected in recent commentary.

It is not as though there existed some short pithy syllabus one could assign Viridiana, which would force her to rethink her malaise from first principles. But beyond seeking scapegoats, there are some serious conceptual reasons why understanding of the current crisis of knowledge production and dissemination has been so disappointing. Since 1980, we have been living through a period of profound innovation in the social practices, institutions, rules and formats of the generation and conveyance of information, which has slowly but inexorably transformed the very meaning of knowledge and the place it occupies in the modern polity. Viridiana’s gut instinct that she is stranded in an alien landscape compared to that of her youth is basically correct; what is needed is a systematic survey of the new university landscape, and not just a pat on the head and a couple of Valium

Viridiana would undoubtedly wish to be told the theory of what was going on, but indeed, there’s the rub. In all likelihood anyone poised conveniently ready and willing to supply an abstract theory (as, say, some economists and legal theorists cited herein) would almost certainly be misrepresenting the situation, because they would omit whole classes of key recent events which, taken together, have brought us to the present impasse. The problem with providing a short précis of said events as a prelude to understanding the modern politics of knowledge is that the trends don’t all point in the same direction. Depending upon your standpoint, some aspects would seem to herald a new dawn of self-organized co-operative inquiry, the invisible college finally made manifest, holding out the promise of a truly open and democratic community of scholarship; whereas others portend a grim brave new world of knowledge haves and have-nots, a road to microserfdom where every trope and concept comes indelibly attached with an electronic price tag, every move is monitored from click to click, and client-centered research can’t be discriminated from sim-stim. Of course, there is the more serious problem that most analysts can’t see beyond their own parochial concerns: technogeeks only see the nifty technology, scientists only see the status of their own science, lawyers only see the law, economists only see market signals, philosophers only see epistemology, sociologists only see networks, NGOs only see globalization, technology transfer officers only see the color of money, and humanists only see the creeping demise of their own disciplines. While the ‘correct’ interpretation of events could never be definitively settled here, the service we might offer Viridiana is: (1) to briefly enumerate the relevant range of economic and social phenomena which should enter into any assessment of the modern politics of knowledge; and (2) begin to describe the ways in which a particular modern theory of political economy – viz., the widely misunderstood doctrine of Neoliberalism – has colored almost every discussion of the fate of the university and the efficient organization of science for the last three decades. This may seem rather paltry and constricted, given the nature of the problems and their urgency, but one hopes that at the end of our survey Viridiana will be in a better position to make up her mind on the sources and implications of her disquiet.

One major lesson we hall hope to convey is the extent to which social and economic events turn out to be inseparable from the history of ideas put to use in order to make sense of them. In this case, we shall argue that much of the modern commercialization of science and the university follows a script promulgated by Neoliberal thinkers. The disdain of philosophers for the concrete, of the economist for the polysemous, the scientist for history, and the science policy maven for political theory, will turn out to be part of the reason for the modern success of the Neoliberal world-view. It seeks, we shall discover, to provide a grand integrative narrative, where all of these other professions have absolved themselves of any responsibility to render the whole coherent. In this section, we will lay out a census of the key events that have shaped the new regime of science management and funding in recent decades, while in the next section we provide a primer in the theory of Neoliberalism for those hesitant to plunge into the key texts. The upshot, we believe, will be to demonstrate that there can be no return to what many fondly imagine as the Cold War Golden Age of Science; moreover, the promise of a future open-source research community built around flexible specialization predicated upon freedom of expression is equally not in the cards.

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