Finally, after this winding detour through the recent doctrinal history of politics and economics, we can return to once again Viridiana, and diagnose her malaise. If only she had been equipped with sufficient background in the Neoliberal Project, she would at least then come to appreciate that all her beliefs about science being conducted “for the public good”, education as exiting to shape moral and intellectual character, and knowledge as embodying intrinsic virtue as part of its constitution, are all hopelessly passé. And by this we do not mean they are merely out of fashion—no, they no longer are grounded in the constellation of institutions she holds dear: the state, the university, the scientific journal, the NSF, the high-class media, the hospital… The neoliberal marketplace of ideas has become inscribed in the laws, the funding agencies, the evaluation structures, the computer on her desk, the very language she uses to teach her students. There are, as always, nodes of resistance: Viridiana has flirted with the idea of having her papers distributed under the “creative commons” copyright license, for instance. But in her darker moments she thinks, isn’t it just like a lawyer to believe that one minor change in one corner of IP law can counteract decades of reification of knowledge into a thing which has come to be defined by its relationship to the marketplace? The last time Viridiana checked, she didn’t even own the copyright of anything she had written over the last three years, since the journal editors made her sign it away as a condition of publication.

As we can now see, each of the trends previously identified are all linked together through their justifications rooted in the Neoliberal political project. The deindustrialization of the West was a direct consequence of the neoliberal push for reducing international trade barriers, particularly when it came to the search for cheap foreign labor that might destroy their political bête noire, the trades unions. Once the manufacturing sector had evaporated in the previously industrialized states, there waiting to extol what remained was the overarching culture complex of the “marketplace of ideas”: what a short leap it was at that point to proselytize for a “New Knowledge Economy”! Indeed, the Knowledge Society was merely a bowdlerization of Hayek’s reconfiguration of the Market as the ideal information processor, once one takes into account the neoliberal precept that there is “no such thing as society” outside of the market.

The computer and the Internet have also become inextricably tangled up with the neoliberal project. When one reads someone like (Benkler, 2006), for instance, one encounters a crusader for the freedom of information (a lawyer!) who has lost all faith in the state as a political actor, and therefore invests what remains of his utopian fervour into the prospect that, “the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: radically decentered, collaborative and non-proprietary… [the] commons leaves individuals free to make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons” (2006, pp.60-63). The Neoliberal Nobel economist Ronald Coase (1974), or Neoliberal legal pundit Richard Posner (2005) couldn’t have put it better. As Neoliberal theorist and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (1963) put it, the First Amendment protection of free speech was only ‘intended’ to apply to political argument, and not literary or scientific discourse. The only limits to knowledge are posited as the current state of technological progress, which itself determines the relative costs and benefits of recourse to direct markets or quasi-markets run by postmodern social formations. Since markets resemble computational networks and vice versa, when it comes to organizing knowledge, you can always imagine replacing one by another. It is only political resistance (that is, direct attack on corporate prerogatives) that is futile.

The massive fortification of intellectual property is one of the stunning success stories of the neoliberal project. It has been the primary method deployed to transmute the marketplace of ideas from a dream scenario into quotidian reality. The dogma that no one would think, or at least convey their thoughts to others, unless they somehow received market recompense for their labors, is a tremendous slander on the history of science and culture, but nevertheless has carried the day to become folk wisdom in the neoteric order. Students have to be taught not to ‘steal’ digital music files, even though within their lifetimes making copies of music had been treated as fair use under copyright law. Likewise, students have to be taught not to ‘steal’ research that they may have carried out themselves, unless they have secured permissions from everyone from their thesis advisor to their university technology transfer office. Since the marketplace is the greatest information processor known to humankind, there is no way that a few extra property rights imposed here and there might actually throttle the further production of knowledge and culture. To suggest otherwise would be to contradict every foundation upon which the Knowledge Economy was built.

The re-engineering of the modern corporation is another triumph of the Neoliberal project. Early on, neoliberals had worried that the separation of ownership from control and the bureaucratic character of the large corporation might actually mitigate or otherwise thwart the operation of market forces in the very heartland of capitalism; the neoliberal solution was to make the inside of the corporation work more like a virtual market. The ‘reforms’ which were imposed from the 1970s onwards ranged from the award of lavish stock options to upper management to more correctly “align their incentives” with the owners of the firm, to the attack on the M-form structure which we have cited as the ‘breakdown of the Chandlerian corporation’. One of the most important aspects of this marketization of the corporation was to treat knowledge not as the special possession of the employees of the firm, but rather to acquiesce in the power of the market as an ideal information processor. The upshot was to render corporate R&D fungible, and to outsource it to the lowest-cost producer. Obviously, the fortification of intellectual property helped render this a viable proposition.

It should have become apparent by now that it is Neoliberal dogma that there is no way that the nation state should act as any kind of science impresario, since the market will always outperform the state as conveyor and nurturer of knowledge. This was indeed the site of one of the very first battles fought by Hayek and his comrades, even before he became known as the patron saint of Neoliberalism. The marketplace of ideas has always been the first thing trotted out whenever the state has endeavored to withdraw from its Cold War functions as patron and organizer of scientific research. Since the marketplace of ideas has progressively become confused with the definition of ‘freedom’ itself, it has become almost impossible for the state to resist the implicit implication that the communal promotion and management of science verges on the anti-democratic. This is the half-submerged subtext to modern battles over the politicization of scientific research.

But there is one more submerged aspect of the Neoliberal regime which would itself go a long way to clarify Viridiana’s unfocused discombobulation. Neoliberalism preaches that one must actively construct an ideal market, and not just wait for it to appear on its own; obviously, this applies to the very marketplace of ideas as well. Hayek and the early neoliberals set out to forge the post-WWII institutions they believed were called for by founding a nested set of institutions to propagate their cause. At the center lay the semi-private debating society, the Mont Pélerin Society, which restricted its membership to a select few true believers vetted by Hayek and other members. This core set was able to discuss the development of Neoliberal doctrine with a ‘blue sky’ attitude, absent the scrutiny and critique of those opposed to their politics. Moving outwards, the next circle consisted of a limited number of academic departments which were taken over by the like-minded: the University of Chicago economics department and law school, the Freiburg School, Schweizerisches Institut für Auslandforschung (Swiss Institute of International Studies), and some others. Their job was to endow the ideas concocted at Mont Pélerin with a veneer of academic legitimacy. The circle after that consisted of a set of purpose-built think tanks, such as the Institute for Economic Analysis, the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, which served to provide homes for Neoliberal scholars to produce targeted policy documents in specific national contexts. Another, outer circle, consisted of foundations like the Heritage Foundation, set up to intervene in political controversies, newspaper op-ed pages, TV talking heads programs and other popularized venues in a timely fashion. The point of the Neoliberal marketplace of ideas was not (as most still seem to believe) simply let a thousand flowers bloom on a level playing field, permit any and all criticism free play, and eventually the truth will out of its own accord. It is instead geared to submit all ideas to the refining fire of dollar votes, within a consciously structured interlocking set of economic markets. This was deemed the only way to counteract those “second-hand dealers in ideas” about whom Hayek was so filled with disdain in the 1950s. As one can observe above, the predominant areas where Neoliberals staked out their fledgling institutions were initially the social sciences, and especially in economics. However, it would be a mistake to think that the model could not or has not been extended in the interim to the natural sciences. What Viridiana observes over the last two decades in climate science, evolutionary biology, pollution ecology, health policy, clinical pharmacology and any other hot-button area of the natural sciences is the concerted construction of parallel Russian-Doll structures of the Neoliberal blueprint for a vibrant “marketplace of ideas” responsive to corporate concerns. Where does Viridiana think the Discovery Institute, the “Advancement of Sound Science Coalition” (hosted by the Cato Institute), the Lavoisier Institute, the Tobacco Institute, and a veritable brigade of others come from, anyway? To blame it all on a few idiosyncratic rich cranks, or better yet, upon the silly season of postmodernism that has supposedly swept like a virus through academe, is to read from the script that the Neoliberals themselves have so conveniently supplied.

Americans, with their habitual self-absorption and political myopia, have tried to characterize this as a “Republican War on Science,” (Mooney, 2005) but as usual, this misses the forest for the trees. Indeed, the Republican Party is merely a Johnny-come-lately to a phenomenon with deeper roots. What we are living through is a transnational program for the spread of the Neoliberal “marketplace of ideas” to every nook and cranny of human intellectual discourse—or, at least, to every area which holds at least some prospect of making a buck. It was inevitable that Neoliberal successes in the social sciences would then be extended to the natural sciences, for as every science studies scholar is aware, the latter have at least as many political implications as the former. What this means is the creation of the full panoply of think tanks, activist sites and echo chambers for the promotion of a specific kind of commercialized natural science, again conveniently, just as universities render themselves open to the commercialization of university research. The entities funding these novel institutions conveniently remain hidden behind the veil of anonymity, appealing innocently that they are just another democratic participant in the open agora of intellectual discourse. If you try and follow the money, well then, they are shocked, just shocked, that you would dare to accuse them of such crude interest politics (McNeil, 2006).

Viridiana is not used to getting much for free in the new commercialized regime of science, but she checks her mailbox at school one day and discovers – mirabile dictu – a free journal, sent unsolicited to her and other faculty members. It is called The New Atlantis: a journal of technology and society, and is published by something called the “Ethics and Public Policy Center” out of Washington DC. As she leafs through it, there are articles on biotechnology, evolution, cloning, space science, and even the Turing Test—and in each and every case, the article hews to the Neoliberal line described above. Of course, you might aver, she could just toss it aside, just like she tosses the Chronicle of Higher Education; no one is forcing her to read it. She is free to ignore the fact that the agenda for discussion is progressively being set more and more by these broadsides emitted from some location vaguely outside/inside of academia – that is, at least until it impinges on her own research funding.
Finally, the extraction of the state from any obligation to provide education to its citizens has constituted a Neoliberal tenet since the earliest days of the movement (Friedman, 1962, chap.6). In the marketplace of ideas, education is the commodity par excellence, and there is every reason to think that it was the state stranglehold on education that had created the hostile atmosphere the early neoliberals had found themselves stranded in during the immediate postwar era. Of course, they never advocated full withdrawal cold turkey—instead they preached ‘choice’ in education, vouchers, creeping privatization of the school system piecemeal (as in the for-profit classroom TV Channel One, promoted by Edison, an operator of for-profit elementary schools), enforced standardized testing, home schooling, and incessant daemonization of the public teaching profession. Twenty years of success in these and other initiatives can only be understood as artifacts of the Neoliberal project to render the marketplace of ideas as the true and only legitimate font of education, and everything else as crippled surrogate. In this brave new world, it is not anything even remotely approaching a joke that Donald Trump can form Trump University, and promote it with a money-back guarantee! (von Hoffman, 2006) If you think that is a trivial example, then check out some of the fastest growing providers of distance education at the college level, such as the “University of Phoenix” or Universitas 21 Global.
Hence the ultimate objective of the Neoliberal program is to totally decouple most functions of scientific research from the educational functions to which they have been wedded during much of the 20th century. Previously, universities had “bundled” many diverse functions together into one institution, but as they become progressively commercialized, they will of necessity find they have to divest themselves of some subset of them, to better concentrate upon their core markets. In this they will have to follow the earlier example of the Chandlerian corporation, which had to open its doors to the market gales of creative destruction to sweep away the vestiges of non-market operations.

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