Quinn Slobodian in Boston Review:
In 2013 Charles Murray traveled to the Galápagos Islands to deliver an address to the Mont Pelerin Society—that font of neoliberalism, founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek. But Murray’s talk didn’t run through the usual neoliberal script: economic liberty, free trade, the genius of the entrepreneur. Instead, his subject was “the rediscovery of human nature and human diversity.” New discoveries in genetics, he argued, would induce “reversions to age-old understandings about the human animal” and undo “the intellectual eclipse of human nature and human diversity in the United States.” He welcomed these developments not only to fight the pernicious effects of what he called the “equality premise” but to better recognize and organize patterns of aptitude in a changing economy.
Though it’s not part of conventional wisdom about the ideological core of neoliberalism, this appeal to nature was a central part of neoliberal thought in the aftermath of the Cold War. Communism had died, but neoliberals feared Leviathan would live on. The poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, and ecological consciousness—forged in the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s—had suffused the body politic, emboldening what they saw as an overbearing state and breeding an atmosphere of political correctness and “victimology,” which in turn stultified free discourse and nurtured a culture of government dependency and special pleading.
Neoliberals sought an antidote to all that, and they found one in hierarchies of gender, race, and cultural difference, which they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition. Meanwhile, changing demographics—an aging white population matched by an expanding nonwhite population—led some of them to rethink the conditions necessary for capitalism. Perhaps cultural homogeneity was a precondition for social stability, and thus the peaceful conduct of market exchange and enjoyment of private property?
More here.
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