Has neoliberalism failed? Reflections on Western society
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening and welcome to tonight's event, a discussion on the timely question of whether neoliberalism has failed with reflections on Western society, hosted by the LSE Hayek Programme.

My name is Jason Alexander. I'm a professor of philosophy at the LSE and I will be chairing this session. One of the many reasons tonight's topic is so timely is that as many people in this room are aware, the post-war rules-based order has faced many challenges over the past decade and the roots of that malaise go back further still.

there is no doubt that we have all been cursed to live in interesting times. In such politically fraught moments as these, it is important to remember the motto of the LSE, which calls upon us to seek to know the causes of things. I am sure tonight's discussion will be illuminating and help us all understand the world a little bit better. I am pleased to introduce our two speakers.

Our first speaker is Dr. Samuel Greig, the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. Dr. Greig has written extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, monetary theory and policy, and natural law theory. He is the author of 17 books.

including "On Order Liberty" , "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization" , and "The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World" . Many of his articles and opinion pieces, over 400 in number, have been translated into a variety of languages.

He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Royal Economic Society, and was elected a distinguished member of the Philadelphia Society in 2023, among many other honors. Our second speaker is Dr. Paola Romero, a guest teacher in the Department of Philosophy at the LSE and a lecturer at NYU London.

Previously, she held a postdoctoral position at Freiburg University, Switzerland. Her research focuses on political philosophy, especially on Kant's account of the general will and his theory of the state. She is currently working on Popper's critique of blueprints in politics. Tonight's event will proceed as follows.

Dr. Gregg will speak for 45 minutes, followed by Dr. Romero, who will speak for 15 minutes. We will then have an open discussion, taking questions from the audience and online. That said, will you please join me in welcoming Dr. Samuel Gregg. Let me begin by thanking for the very kind remarks, but also thanking the Hayek Program in Economics and Liberal Political Economy for hosting my lecture. It's a pleasure to be here.

So as was mentioned, I'm fortunate enough to hold the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. Now one reason I say this is that Hayek was Tuke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics here at the LSE from 1931 until 1950.

And as he said in a 1978 interview, quote, "When you get an appointment as a professor in London at the age of 32, you take it." So here's a picture of Hayek lecturing towards the end of that period, as well as another picture of Hayek being presented with a commemorative plate on the 50th anniversary of his first LSE lecture.

The person presenting it to him is Lord Ralph Darendorf. This happened in 1981. Now, I like this picture because it brings together Hayek, a thinker who I greatly admire, with Lord Darendorf, who was the warden of St Anthony's College, Oxford, when I was doing my DPhil there in the late 1990s. But I also mention Hayek's time at the LSE because Hayek will play a major part in my reflections this evening. And my topic is...

the deeply uncontroversial "has neoliberalism failed?" reflections on Western society. Now this is a broad question open to multiple interpretations, but Hayek played a major part in the shaping of an expression of political economy, which some people call neoliberalism, which in turn played a role in the emergence in many Western nations from the 1970s onwards

of what I will call the age of markets, which in turn replaced what some call the age of Keynes, that in intellectual and policy terms seemingly ran out of steam in the mid-1970s.

Now today, we're often told we have come to the end of the age of Marcus. What some people call neoliberalism, we're told, has run its course and we have entered a new age. This new age, we're informed, is one that reflects a mixture of populism of the left and right, nationalism of the right and left,

and considerable skepticism about free markets and economic globalization more generally. For the sake of simplicity, I'll call this age the age of populism. Now, there are many nuances to this picture.

The rise and fall of any form of political order or economic arrangements is complicated, it's uneven, and it occurs in fits and starts. And there are also many arguments about cause and effect. It's also a blurred process. But we do know that such changes occur when the dominant political economy of a given society begins to falter. The outbreak of a war, a Great Depression,

something that precipitates a collapse of confidence in reigning economic orthodoxies at the level of policymakers, but also among the wider population. But even a crisis and a major change in political economy doesn't mean that the intellectual and institutional slate is wiped clean and we somehow begin back at year zero.

The age of markets, for instance, did not result in the complete obliteration of Keynesian institutions, priorities and thought. It's not at all clear, for instance, that Keynesian macroeconomic premises were ever under serious threat. Nor, I will suggest, has our new age of populism brought to a shuddering halt the various economic liberalization trends that started to take hold in the mid-1970s.

beginning in the Anglo-American world, interestingly enough, with two center-left governments, those being the Carter administration and its decision to engage in deregulation of particular industries, as well as the Callaghan labor government's decision to cut public spending during the same time period.

But while market liberal ideas have not been completely banished from the public square, we have seen a steady drift away from market liberal policies in the realm of policy. A drift that accelerated rapidly during the 2008 financial crisis and now the subsequent outbreak of populist movements throughout Western countries.

Now, this does not mean that Western nations are now re-embracing a heady mixture of the type of programs implemented in Britain following World War II or the great society programs of the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

But it is very clear that market liberalism is presently not winning the battle of ideas in the way that it seemed to be doing so in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Today, such ideas and policies are in a defensive rather than offensive position.

Now, aspects of this change in what Hayek called the climate of opinion have been explored in books like Professor Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, published in 2023. Now, Gerstle describes this as, quote, the fall of a political order that took shape in the 1970s and 1980s and achieved dominance in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.

He goes on to say, "I call this political formation a neoliberal order. Ronald Reagan was its ideological architect. Bill Clinton was its key facilitator." Neoliberalism, Gerstle writes, quote, "was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom."

Now that belief and confidence has visibly faded over the past 10 years and that brings us squarely to the question of this lecture: Has neoliberalism failed? Now before we can answer that question, we need to ask ourselves a preliminary question. That being: What is neoliberalism? Now it's telling that as you can see from this analysis of data produced by my friend the political economist Philip Magnus,

the expression neoliberalism really doesn't enter common parlance until around about 1992.

And before that, the phrase's use was confined to relatively narrow academic circles, such as Michael Foucault's lectures on the topic in the 1970s, or the ruminations of the German philosopher, Othmar Spahn, or the economic sociologist, Alexander Rostov.

Now, the history of the origins and the use of the expression is a separate discussion in itself, but suffice to say, I think today the phrase neoliberalism is almost always used in a pejorative manner. Being neoliberal is seen as a very bad thing. Now, for that said, I think for our purposes, there are two ways in which the term neoliberalism has a descriptive function, a descriptive function.

First, neoliberalism may be used to describe an intellectual agenda first launched in the 1930s to revive classical liberal thought and political economy.

It describes a general effort on the part of economists, historians, philosophers, journalists and what we today would call public intellectuals to refit and rethink classical liberalism for the conditions of the world that emerged after World War I, an event which combined with the Great Depression was widely perceived as having discredited classical liberal economics and political economy.

Now, this rethinking involved an effort by mid-20th century classical liberals to respond to the rise of socialism and the new way of economic thinking that came to be called Keynesianism, and to do so in a manner that acknowledged past mistakes of classical liberals, addressed new challenges, and perhaps above all, which aimed to reestablish the legitimacy of

the legitimacy of classical liberal political economy as a reference point for political and economic debate. Now that word legitimacy is very important and I'll return later to its significance. Suffice to say the effort to rethink classical liberal economic ideas was primarily undertaken by scholars with strong economic credentials,

but who had also experienced the type of education of early 20th century upper middle class men that equipped them to think in an interdisciplinary way and to draw upon modern and classical thinking in doing so.

So this very small group of people, initially from Western Europe and then gradually supplanted by Americans, were for the most part clear that they did not believe that a revival of classical liberal thought meant simply going back to 19th century classical liberal political economy.

Now, as some of you, I suspect, know, there were two key meetings that played a role in this rethinking. The first was the Colloque Walter Lippmann, held in Paris in 1937. The second was the first meeting of what came to be called the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 in Switzerland. Now, Hayek was a key figure at these meetings.

But so too were lesser known figures today, such as Wilhelm Röpke and Wouter Eichen, intellectual architects of the German economic miracle in 1948, as well as Jacques Rouef, the engine of the French economy's reform in 1959.

Now, there are many things that are curious about these meetings. One is that the transcripts of the proceedings show us that the participants were very interested in non-economic subjects. At the first Mont Pelerin meeting, for example, the topics included the future of Germany, the role of history and historians, the possibility of a European federation, the relationship between liberalism and Christianity, etc.,

Now what's important about all this is that it reflects a particular conviction of Hayek and others that reviving classical liberalism, re-legitimizing classical liberalism, meant not only an updated explanation of classical liberal economics in response to the spread of interventionist ideas, it also required a far broader and deeper political and cultural program.

Now, this did not mean that the participants at these meetings agreed on everything. In fact, they didn't. And that included economic issues. There were significant arguments, for example, between Ludwig von Mises and Volta Eucken about the meaning of competition.

But what's apparent is that virtually all this generation of classical liberals believe that the version of liberalism, of classical liberalism, needed to confront social democracy and modern liberalism was a product of a particular civilization: the West. And that it required an interdisciplinary focus and deeper attention to the deeper roots of the free society.

That's one reason why Hayek and others wanted to call the Mont Pelerin Society the Acton-Tocqueville Society. They believed that Acton, Lord Acton the historian, and Alexis de Tocqueville, the political thinker, had a great deal to say about the deeper roots of liberalism, including those roots that preceded the various Enlightenments.

And in the works of Acton and Tocqueville, Hayek and others believed, you could also find historical and political analyses that helped to explain the emergence of political cultures that favored interventionism and how classical liberalism might respond to them. Now, these market liberals certainly engaged in mid-20th century economic debates. And in some cases, they contributed to the implementation of economic liberalization programs.

But non-economic issues were a major focus of these mid-20th century classical liberals. We see this in works like Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, Röpke's A Humane Economy, Volta Eucken's The Foundations of Economics, as well as Jacques Rueff's L'Odor Social. These books don't agree about everything. In fact, what's remarkable is the degree of disagreement between these thinkers.

They also offer different interpretations of figures like Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. Nonetheless, they were in agreement about the importance of developing a diagnosis of what they thought had gone wrong in 19th century liberal Europe, of the importance of exploring the deeper cultural roots of this turn to interventionism, and of determining where and how classical liberalism might have to change.

and how it could re-establish a type of intellectual ascendancy in realms that included but also went beyond economics. So, that's really the first type of market liberalism that emerged in the 20th century that might be descriptively called neoliberalism because they're interested in rethinking classical liberalism.

And over time, these thinkers established a body of thought that intellectually challenged the politics and the economics of the age of Keynes. It was also around their ideas that a small number of think tanks and institutions were established to provide free market alternatives to the Keynesian consensus. In some cases, they did influence some sectors of opinion on the political right in the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany.

Wilhelm Roebke, for example, was very close to Konrad Adenauer and even closer to Ludwig Erhardt, while Jacques Rouef was an unofficial advisor on economic policy to Charles de Gaulle. And this is where I think we start to get to the question of what constitutes the successes or failures of what we're calling neoliberalism in Western societies.

Is it a success to re-establish a body of liberal market thought and institutions that offered alternatives to interventionism? In some senses, yes, that's a success.

Or, should we consider this a failure? Insofar is that it is at best unclear that these ideas and institutions came anywhere near to re-establishing the type of intellectual dominance that classical liberal ideas achieved for periods of time in 19th century Anglo-American and European worlds. So, on that note...

Let's turn to the second way in which we might use neoliberalism in a descriptive way, which is the turn away from neo-Keynesian policies, or at least the emergence of significant free market challenges to interventionist policies that started taking off in the late 1970s.

Whereas Hayek functions as a standard bearer for the first expression of neoliberalism, I think another economist, and I think it fair to say someone more narrowly focused on economics, serves as a representative figure for the second descriptor of neoliberalism. That being the economist Milton Friedman. Seat here with George Shultz and Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Now in his book, The Great Persuasion, the historist Angus Bergen argues, I think convincingly, that by the late 1960s, Friedman had begun to supplant Hayek as the dominant figure in market liberal circles, and most certainly in the Mont Pelerin Society.

A reflection of Friedman's ascendancy, I'd suggest, was the way in which a focus on economics steadily crowded out some of the interdisciplinary emphases on philosophy, law, and history that had preoccupied Hayek. Now, in one sense, economics was always going to dominate 20th century classical liberalism.

Economic topics were central to all the meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society, and still are. But with the shift of the epicenter of classical liberalism from Europe to America, and the ascendancy of the Chicago School in the 1960s associated with Friedman and others like Gary Becker, non-economic topics received less attention.

But this shift also had something to do with the times. By the late 1970s, many Western economies were mired in stagnation, unemployment, and economic growth had stalled. But the shift also owed something to the decision of prominent market liberals, most notably Friedman, to promote rather aggressively

free market policies in the realm of politics that in varying ways came to be followed, usually inconsistently, by parties of the left and the right throughout the Western world. These governments were looking for solutions to their nation's economic problems, and market liberals like Friedman seemed to offer concrete solutions. You see him here talking to Richard Nixon, and Nixon basically ignored him.

But the point is he's in the Oval Office talking to Richard Nixon about economic policy. So let's look at some of these policies. First, trade liberalisation.

After World War II, the America committed itself to trade liberalization, partly for its own national security reasons, but also because it was a way of continuing a policy that had preoccupied American policymakers all the way back to the 1790s, which was to gain access to foreign markets for American goods.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, this process accelerated across the world. In many countries, it also went together with emergent skepticism about industrial policy. Second, the freeing up, the liberalization of domestic and international capital markets and the freeing up of exchange rates. Third, an emphasis upon monetary stability and strong anti-inflation stances.

Fourth, personal and corporate tax cuts. This was pursued in the United States, especially under the Reagan administration, but also in other countries. Labor governments in Australia and New Zealand, for example, delivered substantive reductions in taxation.

Fifth, privatization and deregulation. The selling off of state enterprises, the opening up of competition into economic sectors previously dominated by state monopolies, and the substantial deregulation of significant economic sectors. Sixth, an effort to streamline and reduce welfare programs, public spending more generally, and to reduce the state's size of GDP consumption.

Seventh, a concerted effort to reduce trade union power. This is something that Hayek had always insisted upon, both from the standpoint of rule of law, because he thought that trade unions were being accorded legal privileges, but also because market liberals believed that inflation and unemployment were exacerbated by an ever upward increase in wages pushed by unions that were not matched by productivity increases.

Now during this period, trade unionism in most Western countries was already in decline, as many people started moving into economic sectors with weaker traditions of trade unionism. Membership of the National Union of Miners, for instance, was already in decline in the 1970s. Likewise, trade union membership had begun declining in countries like America and Australia during this period.

Nonetheless, the diminishment of trade union power was a major part of the market liberal agenda. Now, there's lots of other things I could add to this list, but I think that these are the main ones. And to varying degrees, many Western countries pursued some version of these policies, albeit often inconsistently and with different degrees of magnitude.

Now to this I want to add a few observations about the competing narratives, the competing narratives in which these market liberal ideas were presented and pursued. So in the case of America and Britain, market liberalization policies primarily were pursued by conservatives. And it was integrated into a narrative about national revival, national greatness, etc.,

Now, it was also the case that a case for market liberalization made by a Reagan conservative in the 1980s differed significantly from that presented by, say, strict libertarians in the same period. For Reagan conservatives, free markets were associated with an argument for a particular vision of America,

that drew upon narratives of American greatness, moral regeneration, anti-communism, and traditional American skepticism about government.

Strict libertarians, on the other hand, linked their arguments to agendas of personal liberation, cosmopolitanism, and the promotion of societies free of prescribed social roles. Not dissimilar, ironically enough, from ideas that preoccupied the Bloomsbury set to which Hayek's intellectual nemesis, John Maynard Keynes, belonged for most of his life.

In the case of market liberalization pursued by labor governments in countries like New Zealand and Australia, the messaging, the narrative was very different. It was presented as removing privileges, of forcing businesses to compete, and of lowering the price of goods and services to make them more accessible to less economically well-off people.

Overshadowing all these narratives was an even broader narrative, one heavily shaped by the collapse of communist regimes. The manifest failure of central planning played a major role in undermining the credibility of the starkest alternatives to market liberalism.

Now that development, I think, is crucial for understanding the background to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. History, the argument meant, was ending in liberal democracy and market economies, and it was really just a question of how fast that occurred.

So let's move to assessing. Assessing success or failure of the advancement of these programs. Now to be clear, I'm not talking about whether the objective of these policies were good. I'm asking about the extent to which they were successfully or unsuccessfully implemented. So let's start with the economics. I think we can say that parts of the market liberal economic agenda, this neoliberalism, remain in place.

others have substantially weakened, and yet others never even made much of an impact in the first place. So for example, we see here no major revival of trade unions on the scale that existed in the post-war period. In the private sector, the decline in union membership across the Western world shows no sign of decline.

So, to the extent that market liberalisation policies contributed to these trends, they did not fail. Another question: capital flows. Well, it's certainly true that capital flows, as you can see here, have slowed down around the world.

But at the same time, there's no major effort afoot by any Western government to return to the types of restrictions that existed on capital flows that preceded the 1980s. So, market liberal win. Something similar, I think, can be said about trade liberalization. In this recent article, this recent article by the economist Barry Etchengreen,

He points out, quote, that bilateral trade between the world's two largest economies, China and America, has been slowing relative to global trade. But he says, despite the financial crisis, despite COVID, despite Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite US-China tensions, the scope and scale of global trade continues to grow.

So in other words, the landscape of economic globalization may have changed in relation to these events, especially because of growing China-US rivalry, but we've seen no fundamental reversal in the process of trade liberalization, despite growing skepticism about trade liberalization from economic nationalists. In other areas, however, I think a more mixed picture emerges.

Let's take privatization. So as you can see here, we see an increase in the number of privatizations being undertaken by governments all the way up until around about 2010. But very few countries now are engaging in privatizations. Very, very few. The same can be said, a similar picture emerges when it comes to taxes.

So here's a picture of what's going on within OECD countries when it comes to corporate taxation. Basically, it's declined, the rate has declined from the 2000s from about 25% down to around about 20%. So that's somewhat of a success, but I don't think anything on the scale that most market liberals would have liked. As for the overall scope and size of regulation,

I know of no country in the world in which there has been a fall in the overall scope and scale of regulation. If anything, the exact opposite is true of the United States, the European Union, and Britain. So here's the pages of the federal code of federal regulations in the United States.

So you can see here, increase, increase, increase. Reagan, well, starts to... It's still increasing, but not by as much. We go up here, it flattens, and then it keeps growing and growing and growing and growing. So that shows no fall in the overall size and number of regulations. And this is during the age of markets. So this is not a neoliberal win. This is a loss.

As for the rise and fall of inflation, the emphasis upon monetary stability, etc., all these things have been significantly compromised in more recent years with the inflationary outbreaks that we've seen.

But note, however, that while governments might have allowed the inflation genie to get out of the bottle, the populations in most countries which experienced this clearly did not like this. They did not like this. In other words, tolerance for inflation is very low in Western countries today, and that might be counted as somewhat of a market liberal win. Lastly,

welfare programs and the size of the welfare state. As this diagram of welfare in America shows, this is an area where marked liberal efforts to reduce the size and scope of welfare programs have had very little impact. In retrospect, the welfare reforms undertaken here by the Contract with America Republicans and the Clinton administration, where you see a flattening

But then now today entitlement programs constitute the bulk of federal government spending in the United States, dwarfing things like defense expenditures. In other words, market liberals have not been very successful at reducing something they have long regarded as economically costly and culturally debilitating.

Finally, I also think that the efforts of market liberalism to achieve a type of ascendancy in the climate of ideas throughout Western countries are very much in abeyance. We no longer live in a world in which political parties of left and right broadly regard growing economic freedom as a priority. Right populists and left populists, like these two gentlemen, disagree about lots of topics.

but there's a remarkable convergence around, for example, the idea that the costs of trade liberalization exceed the benefits and that it is neither good nor politically expedient to wind back welfare programs. Now this is perhaps most evident in the United States, where the progressive left and now much of the right are very much on the same page when it comes to questions of economic policy.

you only need to look at the economic policies espoused by Senator Bernie Sanders of the progressive left and President Donald Trump of the populist right to see considerable similarities in areas ranging from trade policy to even their views about trade unions. They also articulate a very similar narrative, the narrative that specific sectors of the American economy and particular regions of America have been hollowed out

as a consequence of trade liberalization. The populist right has been remarkably successful in linking the idea of America and American greatness to protectionist policies and the wider use of industrial policy. The populist left have similarly been successful in associating free trade with the interests of the wealthy and protectionism with the interests of the less well-off.

And this points, I think, to an overall trend about market liberalism in our time. It's simply much harder for political parties and political leaders in Western societies to present themselves as strong advocates of market liberalization policies without being dismissed or derided as neoliberal market fundamentalists.

And that brings us, I think, to a crucial dynamic that I previously mentioned, which is that market liberalism has lost a great deal of its legitimacy. Now, by legitimacy, I don't mean popularity. I don't mean democratic majorities. Even during the heyday of market liberalism, some market liberal ideas remained deeply unpopular across the political spectrum.

"By legitimacy, I mean the notion that a set of ideas and underlying policies enjoy a type of authority that is respected or at least functions as a major reference point that sets the parameters for public discussion and public policy at the level of elites but also among those who Hayek called the second-hand dealers in ideas." Think about it this way.

The Attlee government, the Attlee-Labor government between 1945 and 1951, and Thatcher and major conservative governments between 1979 and 1997, operated in settings in which there had been a major change in the climate of ideas.

In Attlee's case, a sense that the government simply had to do more in the economy. In Thatcher's case, government had come to be seen as intervening far too much in the economy. Climate of ideas helped ensure that their successor governments, those of Winston Churchill and Tony Blair respectively,

reflected considerable continuity at the level of economic policy with their immediate predecessors. So, I think a key attribute of this is to think about it this way: the ability, the ability of an ideological dominant movement, its success can be measured in terms of its ability to bend the other side to its will. So that Tony Blair

is a sort of free market guy in a way that Winston Churchill in 1951 was not. So this doesn't mean that the acceptance of the dominant ideas is total. It does however mean that there's considerable agreement about what elected officials and policy makers, whatever their political party, considers politically feasible and politically worthy goals.

Now herein, I think, lies the deeper failure of post-1970s market liberal positions. They presently lack legitimacy. They've failed to maintain their legitimacy, their edge of authority.

Policies like privatization or substantive welfare cuts, for example, no longer fall within the realm of the politically acceptable in Western countries. And I think this absence of legitimacy for market liberal positions in our age of populism is going to make it very, very hard for market liberals to shape the climate of ideas in Western countries.

Even if Western countries experienced a major economic downturn, or if there was a financial crisis on the scale of 2008, it's not obvious that Western governments would necessarily opt for market liberal solutions in the way that they did in the late 1970s and 1980s. Market liberal ideas do not have legitimacy in our time. Which brings me back to Hayek.

One of the many insights that Hayek had in the 1930s and 1940s was that market liberalism required rethinking if it was to regain legitimacy, and that market liberalism, he understood,

could not simply replicate the past world of 19th century liberal Europe, let alone the world of 19th century liberal England that Hayek loved so much, but which even he recognized had died several decades before Hayek even set foot in the LSE.

So this suggests, I think, that any effort on the part of market liberals today to challenge the growing ascendancy of the mixtures of populism and interventionism that are now becoming so powerful in so many Western countries is going to require some type of reinvention. A neo-neo-liberalism, if you want to call it that. So, at a minimum, and here I'm going to conclude, I think that this would require three things.

First, market liberals must engage in a dispassionate analysis of why and how the climate of ideas has changed. Instead of just being scornful and dismissive of the populist phenomena, they need to understand and try and analyze the populist phenomena as hazy and as incoherent as this phenomena may be.

Market liberals need to ask themselves what is it that is driving populists on the left and the right, however irrational some of these concerns might be, and then determine what market liberals can and cannot do to alleviate such concerns without abandoning core market liberal principles.

As the historian Alan Kahan writes, quote, "To overcome populism, liberals must find a way to reduce the fears of populists, overcome their cultural alienation, and regain, to the extent that it is possible, legitimacy in the populists' eyes." Second, market liberals need to engage in a very blunt assessment.

of where their ideas had a lasting impact and where they did not. Now, by that, I don't just mean some of the policy issues that I've looked at briefly. I'm also thinking of broader questions, of overall economic frameworks and theories. It's true, for instance, that many Keynesian assumptions about monetary policy and monetary theory were challenged by people like Milton Friedman and the School of Monetarism in the 1970s and 1980s.

But Friedman's monetarism was arguably a critique formed from within a Keynesian framework of aggregate macroeconomic management rather than a wholesale alternative to that framework, such as we find in Hayek's basic skepticism about macroeconomics as a whole and Hayek's insistence that the real action lies with microeconomics, with the knowledge problem, and with price theory.

Third, and lastly, market liberals obviously have to re-establish the legitimacy of market liberal ideas in the public square. And that necessarily means, I think, going beyond the realm of technical economics and deeper and deeper into the realm of political economy, especially the normative, legal, and cultural dimensions of political economies.

I'm not talking here about sloganeering or better marketing or the clever use of rhetoric, as important as these things might be. Rather, I have in mind something similar to the type of deeper and lasting exercise undertaken by people like Adam Smith and movements such as the Scottish Enlightenment, an endeavour that was informed by a civilisational vision that included a new economic realm,

economic rationale to explain that world, but also powerful normative explanations about why that world would represent improvement on the present. Now from the late 1930s, Hayek moved very much in the direction of such a project.

one that included attention to prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, but also 19th century liberals like Acton and Tocqueville, whose concerns were not primarily economics, but nonetheless had important things to say about the roots and preconditions of a free society and by extension market economies. To some extent, Hayek succeeded.

And that success, this type of neoliberal success, helped to clear the way for a new age of markets as incomplete and transitory as it now seems to us today. This is a perpetual reminder to us that while times are tough for market liberals, a reinvention of market liberalism and reestablishing its legitimacy is not beyond them.

if they have the wit and the ambition and the imagination to make it so. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. It's very difficult to follow up on that. And I agree on the suggestions, Samuel, and thank you. So I'm just going to try to add something to this general picture here.

And before coming in today, I mentioned to some people that I was going to offer some reflections on the question, has neoliberalism failed? And to my surprise, it was interesting, the uniformity of the answers. And people generally, without hesitation, at least my colleagues at the LSE, said, of course it has not failed. It's the ultimate success story. I didn't see that coming.

And I think that what they have in mind is a caricature of neoliberalism. The picture where we're talking about the success of the liberalization of the market, the success of competition, the success of individualism.

And I think that Samuel Gregg tonight has shown very clearly how that is not what we actually see, what is actually happening. I think this is the wrong picture because the real winner has been interventionism, regulation, and popular democracy instead of participatory and constitutional democracy.

And neoliberalism, I think, has never been the defense of this economic and political model. Rather, to the contrary, it has been an attempt, as Samuel Gregg has also said, to ground classical liberalism, traditional Hume, Adam Smith,

in emerging concerns about populism, collectivism and inequality. If you read Walter Elkin, for example, that was mentioned before, he talks about a humane version of the market. And if you read Hayek with a bit more of detail and not just the caricature, he talks about the importance of a minimal welfare state and the conversation is open whether it should be that minimal.

However, I find the whole enterprise of getting neoliberalism right far less important than understanding why neoliberalism understood, as I said, as the grounding classical liberal's ideas with new emerging concerns. Why has it been so misunderstood? Why has it been so distorted? I find that question really interesting.

And I think that one potential answer, and I think that this answer is both political and philosophical,

is that from the point of view of its critics, neoliberal policies are the natural and sort of inevitable children of classical liberal principles. And I think that this argument, we need to seriously engage with it. Is there something about certain principles within classical liberalism that by necessity lead to neoliberal policies in the way we heard before?

So from this point of view, there is no real distortion of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is an intrinsic, inevitable, the critics would say, degeneration of classical liberalism. I think that there are serious elements of truth in this analysis because one can consider that bad consequences can follow from good principles. I will have more to say about this in my short intervention at the end.

Another answer that I can't quite articulate, but that I'm going to try to illustrate, is a more ideological answer to the question, why has neoliberalism been so misunderstood or often distorted?

From this perspective, talking of neoliberalism is a way of amalgamating into one single story or one single ideological back a bunch of things that don't naturally belong together. The far right, the right, the center right, it still exists, I don't know, classical liberals, libertarians, and Euken Hayekian-like neoliberals.

In doing this, we seem to lose political alternatives that are relevant and important for the bargaining of political power, and we also lose the relevant nuances that come with these different political alternatives. That is why when I say, personally, I defend the free market,

which I do, I hope not to lose my job at the LSE, I can be seen as a potential Marie Le Pen voter. And that's weird. That is really weird. Which means that I will be voting for the opposite of what I believe in, which would be rampant interventionism.

To be clear, I think some sectors of the right-wing brigade also incur in this ideological maneuvering vis-à-vis the left. What I mean by this is that I come from Venezuela, and in our political context, I have had to learn that being left-wing doesn't mean supporting Maduro. We ought to account for the gray spaces in the left,

but I also believe that we have to allow for grey spaces in the right. And very fitting and telling illustration of what I want to call this collapsing of the greys is the story of the neoliberalism museum in South London. Who has been? You see, he's done the homework.

It opened in 2019. Its founder had originally intended to dedicate the museum to Thatcherism. That was the aim of the museum. But because he thought it was all one big family, Pinochet, Thatcher, Mises, Milton, and Hayek, he said what you really need to make is a museum about neoliberalism, the mixed bag that I was talking about. So the museum...

had a section dedicated to Amazon workers. It had this nice, I think it's a puzzle, I don't know, of Richard Branson's Tax Haven Island. It looks like Australia. I'm worried about that. And, of course, merchandising sold through PayPal. And I can show you this one, which I think it's really cool. Don't believe everything billionaires say to you.

So, however, just like Saturn ate his children, capitalism ate the museum of neoliberalism. Last year, the landlords of the building decided to demolish the site to build, what do you think they built? Luxury flats. What else? So someone reported online that a museum visitor said, that stinks, it sucks. And I agree with them.

Another example of what I am calling... Sorry, I had to change the slides. Of what I'm talking about, this kind of distorted way of thinking about neoliberalism and this collapsing of grace is an example in the V&A. So there was an exhibition about British humour and politics

and there was this little Margaret Thatcher puppet, and it had the following description. Over the years, the evil character of this puppet show has shifted from the devil to unpopular public figures, including Hitler, Thatcher, and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.

So naturally there were members of the public that objected. I was one of them and sent letters to the VNA and they responded in an official statement taking out the label and saying, we do appreciate that the original wording was open to misinterpretation and we have updated it. As the late queen would say, recollections defer.

So I thought that one way of understanding these cases of distortion and irony, these ideological ways of distorting original ways of thinking and legitimate ways of thinking,

It's by means of an analogy. So I've been trying to think whether in history there's been a similar case where something or an ideology or an idea or a theory or a movement defends A, but it's been interpreted as defending exactly its opposite. And I think that maybe hedonism is a good example to think by means of analogy.

We tend to think of Epicureanism as the defense of pleasure, the exaltations of the joys of life, and the sort of do today and don't think about tomorrow hedonism. Actually, Epicurus was advocating exactly the opposite. Pleasure and sensations are the roots of suffering, death,

So, death, however, will be the end of all sensation, hence the end of suffering. So Epicureanism is essentially a philosopher to learn how to die not having fun. And we got it all wrong.

If you read Epicurious, he suggests that life should be about restricting our pleasures, taming our desires, aiming at tranquility, and he says that this can be better achieved alone. So before we go into the Q&A, which I'm very much longing for, as I said at the start, even if we try to show...

the grace and nuances of neoliberalism. I don't think it's enough to get it right. And this image Sam just showed, Hayek at the LSE, this is Walter Oicken teaching somewhere, but I think it's very fitting because unfortunately he died before giving one of his final lectures at the LSE in 1950. So I want to imagine that's a room in the LSE where Oicken would have given his final lecture.

I think that as liberals, we're wasting too much time trying to show what is wrong, as I said, with neoliberalism and how to get it right. What we should do...

What I suggest we should do instead is to do two amendments in addition to the three things that Samuel Gregg rightly invited us to do. One, the first, is to accept and then to understand why some liberal principles have led, if not by necessity, surely by political practice and implementation, what Samuel Gregg called policies, neoliberal policies.

to the atomization of the family, to unregulated competition, and to the rise of social alienation. And I think that Jason Alexander, who is the chair tonight in his book, The Open Society as an Enemy, is a very good attempt at doing this kind of reflection. How internally within liberalism we need to get it right, why certain things went wrong. The second thing I want to suggest is

It's very simple that we go back to the basics. What is the basic? Constitutional democratic rule of law above all. And of course, it sounds very simple, but we seem to have forgotten the importance of this pillar of

Once we agree again on that basic principle, then we can go back to the boxing ring and have a fight over whether the state should be big or should be small, or whether markets enhance freedom or limited. I hope neoliberals, in the sense discussed tonight, will win that ideological fight. But again, it's an open competition. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Samuel and Paola, for those fascinating and interesting remarks. So if you have a question that you would like to ask either Samuel or Paola, could you please raise your hand? I will identify you, and then we will have someone with a mark, with a microphone, bring it to you. So the individual in the fourth row back wearing the scarf, so...

Hi, thank you very much for the talk. A question to both of you is, in the thinking of Friedman and Hayek, where did third world countries play a role and the newly independent nations and former colonies? Well, tonight we talked about Western countries, so we didn't talk about the developing world. It was called the third world at one point in time.

Both of them traveled extensively throughout the world, particularly after they won their Nobel Prizes. When you win a Nobel Prize, everyone wants to talk to you. And both of them traveled extensively in Latin America, Africa, parts of Southeast Asia. And for the most part, the arguments that they made were things like, if you want economic development...

you need to integrate yourselves into international markets. That dependency theory, as it was called, was a recipe for stagnation, cronyism, corruption, and that you needed to work very hard on what you might call the basic institutional framework in which markets operate. And that's the hard part. It's very hard to establish things like what we would call rule of law.

general principles, universally applicable, etc. And the institutional framework that supports that and the protections that that needs in societies that have either at best checkered histories of that or no history whatsoever of those things at all.

Or societies in which things like rule of law had come to be seen as, well that's what the rich people do, that's how they live their lives and it's a form of oppression for the rest of us. So they were very careful not to get into specifying very, very specific policies beyond some of the institutional generalities that I just mentioned.

One thing they did talk about, though, and this was particularly in the case of Latin America, was the need to fight inflation first. Friedman was famous for saying that you really can't start to fix your economic problems if you have a society and an economy in which the inflation rate is 200%, 250%, etc.,

So that's how I would describe it. They were very careful not to talk too much about the specifics of particular countries. They were much more interested in talking about these general, what you might call framework questions and institutional questions than offering very, very specific solutions for very particular countries. Thank you. Thank you. Very fascinating presentation. But it's a bit disappointing there's no mention of inequalities.

inequality as an outcome, if you like, from the neoliberal project. And some people claim that that was one of its greatest failures, really, that the neoliberal model was taken to such extreme that it brought about such inequalities

which may have corrupted democracy itself and brought about populism. So just a question about the outcome of inequality and the extent to which we think that was part of the failure of the neoliberal model taken to its extreme. So I'll say a couple of things. One is that there was one form of equality that neoliberals were very concerned about, and that was rule of law.

the idea that everyone is equal before the law regardless of their social status, wealth, colour, creed, etc. That was the locus of their understanding of equality. So they were less concerned with issues of what you might call inequalities of wealth. They did talk about the need for, in Hayek's case, he certainly talked about the need for a minimal welfare state.

But liberty and equality before the law were the primary normative things that they talked about. So that's the first thing. The second thing you have to ask is there's a lot of disputes about the question of inequality, economic inequality, for example. This is something that

going on in the United States right now and the argument is that trade liberalization for example has negatively affected particular regions of the United States because they were traditionally reliant upon manufacturing etc and

And that the coasts, which are much more service orientated, etc., have benefited immensely from this. So you have very rich coasts and a centre that is considerably economically poorer. Well, that's the argument that you hear. But there are a lot of people that dispute that, that would say actually manufacturing workers are doing fine. There are just fewer of them because of technological change.

Or they're saying things like the opening up of gaps in wealth are not as extensive as some people see. So for example, there's a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC named Scott Winscliffe, who's done a lot of work on the empirical side of this. And I can only talk about America because that's the country I know the best.

And he argues that the wealth gaps that are often presented by people on the left and on the right now as being major social problems, his argument is that if you look at overall living standards, if you look at what a wealthy person or a middle class person had in 1950 compared to today,

their light years ahead of where they used to be. So I guess my point would be that some of these questions about degrees of economic inequality are heavily disputed, much more I think than we realize. Yeah, so there is a question from LSE alumni James Rice. He asks, in an era marked by resurgent economic nationalism, inequality and populism against globalization, do you believe the intellectual framework of Hayek and Friedman remains adequate?

Adam Smith warned about the collusion of economic elites and Keynes, though no opponent of markets, saw a necessary role for the state in stabilizing capitalism. Have we reached a moment where classical liberalism must reckon with its historical trajectory or that its resilience lies in return to its foundational principles? Or in light of recent upheavals, could we witness the resurgence of a new golden age of classical liberalism adapted for the challenges of the 21st century?

Yes, well, that's a very broad question, but I think it also brings in the question of globalization. And I think that one way in which classical liberalism needs to rethink is to find an answer to a new question that is not in the books, the question of the combination of globalization of markets and trade, but on the other hand,

a return to nationalism, close borders. There is a very strong tension between those two things and I think that's one of the bits in the homework that I wanted to suggest. Whether classical liberalism is a theory that is resilient to emerging problems in our world today,

I think it has to be because it is a theory about freedom and it is a theory about the limitation of power. So I think that those problems, the problem of one guy having too much power in his hands and the problem of inequality and the problem of gender inequality are perennial. So there has to be something in the back to answer them.

So I had a couple of things. One is, I think my answer to that question is yes, definitely classical liberals need to engage in a substantive amount of rethinking because classical liberals have always done that, particularly in times when their ideas are pushed to the margins, which is what we find ourselves in today.

I often argue that market liberals are exceptionally good at making economic arguments and they're lousy at making normative arguments. That's partly because of the way economists are trained. Apologies to economists. But I think that's part of it. And people like, so I might put it this way. We need more Hayek and less Friedman.

Friedman was very, very focused on economic policy. When it came to normative questions, it was basically liberty, liberty, liberty. And that's okay, fine, but to my mind that's not a sufficient answer to some of these questions. Hayek was much more interested in coming up with a stronger normative framework that would deal with some of the objections, the moral objections, political objections, economic objections.

And if you look at the second half of his life, that's most of what he spent his time doing. He wrote a few things on monetary policy in the 1970s, but he was writing books. His Constitution of Liberty, there's economics in it, but most of it's political theory and legal theory. If you look at his law, legislation, and liberty, that's all about constitutionalism, etc. If you read his Fatal Conceit, depending on how much you actually believe, how much he actually wrote of that himself,

that's very much cultural and sociological, etc. And I think that's the challenge for classical liberals today. And also, the question about inequality. Another way, I think, in which classical liberals can grapple with this is the inequalities that are created by cronyism. We don't talk about that as a form of inequality very much. But Adam Smith certainly did. Adam Smith didn't like business people very much.

The reason is that he thought that they were prone to colluding with government officials to obtain privileges. So I always say, if you want to look behind a tariff, there's always a special interest group that wants favors. That, I think, is something that... The cronyism thing, I think, is one cause of some of the populism in the United States. And I get it. I don't like cronyism either. But their solutions would actually make the situation far worse by increasing the size of the state...

I think that that's another issue that classical liberals need to tackle because I think it answers some of the objections that we hear from some of the economic nationalists in ways that they might find surprising. All right, thank you. So other questions? So can we take a question from the upper deck? So the person sitting over there, please.

Hello. So when we talk about neoliberalism and communism, as liberalists, we always ask, okay, where has communism actually worked? And they ask the same question back.

I think there's a key example possibly in Switzerland. So could we look at Switzerland as the example for a neoliberalist success? And to what extent do you think the Montprelant society influenced the Swiss political and economic system? Nowadays, Switzerland ranks first or second in economic freedom and still uses monetarist ideas in its monetary policy, such as monitoring monetary aggregates, which in the last 10 years, their peak inflation has been 3.5%, which we know has been a huge issue in the West.

And with lower taxes and less regulation, it also performs better in inequality than any other large welfare states in Europe.

So you're asking about Switzerland in particular. Okay, so one of the people I mentioned as one of the founders of, very involved in the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society, in fact, I would argue was almost a co-eco in founding the Mont Pelerin Society, was Wilhelm Röpke. He lived in Switzerland. He lived in Geneva. He lectured at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in

after he moved there in 1936, having lived in Turkey before that because the Nazis kicked him out of Germany. And he used Switzerland as a bit of a model for the type of society that he thought would fit this classical liberal model.

And some of the things he identified were some of the things that you mentioned, things like monetary stability, tremendous emphasis upon that, controls on welfare, etc. But the other thing that he stressed, which I think is a lesson for us today, is decentralization.

the decentralization of power. And Switzerland, of course, is the exemplar in many respects of a decentralized federalist system that works and puts political power much more in the hands of local communities, etc., that have to make decisions that affect themselves and they can't just be, the cost just can't be passed on to other people.

So, to the extent that Switzerland functions as a type of model of a decentralized, relatively market-orientated society in which government is, certainly the federal government is considerably limited in what it can do, and in which you have popular input through constant referendums about every possible subject you can imagine from every single canton in the country. Switzerland, I think, is actually not a bad example of

classical liberal success story. I'm not sure that people in Switzerland would necessarily describe it like that, but when you look at the features, the institutional and cultural and political features, there's something to be said for that. When I was living in Switzerland, one of the many votes, the referenda that happened, had a very interesting question, and the question was, I don't remember the details, but it was something like, should we tax the rich? I don't know if it was the top 5% or how much,

And I think the vote was very, very high in favor of not taxing the rich. And I think that was very revealing for me of the idea that people have the ambition and the longing to earn well and not be taxed.

Hi. Thank you for a great presentation. My question is both to Samuel and Paola, if you would like to answer. I was wondering if you could reflect on possible shift of power from governments to multinational companies, say tech leads, and shift of wealth concentration from, say, royals, rulers, to owners of those companies, and maybe comment if we are witnessing some sort of redefined or refined neoliberalism where

increasing imposing tariffs is not aimed at protecting local market from international market, yet protecting certain companies from their competitors. Thank you. I'll say a couple of things. I wouldn't like to be a multinational corporation these days because they're actually under immense pressure from all sorts of governments, including the new administration in Washington DC saying,

"Sure, you're welcome to do business here, but you've got to do business here." Right? "You need to move your enterprise here, otherwise we'll tariff you." So, one of the things that I think is driving some of the populist sentiment is anger against Wall Street, against large corporations. People look at things like the financial crisis of 2008 and say, "Well,

A lot of these banks and financial houses got bailed out after, in some cases, making very irresponsible decisions. So you can understand why there's a lot of people in many countries who resent that. And they're right to be angry about that because you can't have a system in which profits are privatized and the losses are socialized.

which is essentially what happened during a lot of the financial crisis. And that, I think, has done a lot, certainly in the United States, that's done a lot of damage to the power, perceived power of large corporations as a consequence of that. And it's very interesting to see how quickly so many of them have rolled over over the past two months to adopting positions like, okay, we're getting rid of DEI now.

Because there's a different administration in Washington, D.C. Or, well, we want these tax cuts to remain in place, so we're going to be much more friendly to the administration as well. In other words, political power, I think, will ultimately trump economic power. I didn't use that word deliberately. But I think political power will ultimately trump economic power because political power has the force of legal coercion in a way that economic power doesn't.

can't do quite the same thing. And in fact, I think what we'll see is a lot of large companies looking around the world for, "Okay, do we go to America or do we stay in the European Union or do we go somewhere else?" because they can't assume as friendly a welcome as they once assumed, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago. So the notion that these are all-powerful, unaccountable organisations, I think, needs a lot of re-examination.

And I share your worry, and I think that one interesting thing of our times that we need to understand is this relationship between tech, money, and power. I think we've never seen before the alliance of money and power have always slept well together, but the element of tech in this equation. And it makes me think...

in the spirit of your question, of Plato's analysis of the generation of regimes. So he was very worried about oligarchy, so the power of the very few, but also plutocracy, which is the power of the rich. Of course, his response to that was a critique of democracy, and I think that the response should be democratic, but in the participatory and not popular sense.

I was just wondering, what do you think is the cause of the PR issue for liberalism or neoliberalism? Like, if we've largely rejected loads of the teachings, why do we, like, want...

Oh, have we got time for another lecture? So I have a few thoughts on that. I'm sure Paolo has as well. I think the financial crisis did enormous damage to capitalism per se, per se. Now, I could give you an argument about why I think excessive government regulation, government pump-priming the housing market,

keeping the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates too low for too long. I could give you a whole explanation as to why I think the role of mistaken economic policies that involved actually a fair amount of interventionism are the real culprit. But it doesn't matter because that's not the narrative that won. The narrative that won was that this was irresponsible bankers, out of control, lack of regulation, etc., etc.

Regardless of the facts, the narrative that won was that this is the responsibility of policy changes that were made to regulation in the United States and the European Union in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. So that's one reason. The second reason, I mentioned it before, is that I think market liberals, with some exceptions, are not particularly good at coming up with strong normative responses.

Market liberals are very good at coming up with, this is the policy and you can see it, this graph, it works out this way, we've got equilibrium, it's working, let's make money. But that's not satisfying to lots of people because human beings are not homo-economicals. We're not.

And I don't actually know many market liberals who believe that human beings are homo economicus at all. But nonetheless, I think that's part of the reputation that a lot of market liberal thinkers and institutions, for better or worse, have acquired. And the problem on the market liberal side is that they haven't sufficiently addressed this. It's just not enough to win an argument with economic logic and rationale alone. That's super important.

But it's not enough because we're more than just economic beings. And classical liberals like Hayek and Robke and Eucken understood this.

I like the way you phrase it as a PR issue. I think that maybe we should just invest some money and get some advice. But interestingly, Hayek worried about this, and you must remember that text of why I'm not a conservative. I think right at the end he says that liberalism, classical liberalism, requires an utopia. We also need our story with our heroes and with our fantasies.

But it's inimical, it's antithetical to liberalism to offer a utopia because we're also committed to skepticism, to healthy skepticism. We're committed to not having a list of how things should go, a centralized agent to make them work. So...

if committing to healthy scepticism, to a suspicion about power, will not make us win the PR advertisement, then so be it. Thank you very much for the speech there. How far into market economics can you get before you get into this sort of Ayn Rand world? That sort of, which to me is quite scary. I'm not a fan of Rand.

I won't bore you with the details, but if you're asking... There's several ways I could take your question. One is, are you asking how far is it before market liberalism ends up in a type of Gordon Gekko, greed is good world? I don't think that's likely because classical... Certainly classical liberal thinkers have always recognised...

that humans are far more than just utility maximisers, that they have fellow feeling. For those of you who haven't read it, it's always useful to pair...

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations with his theory of moral sentiments because it's a very powerful explanation of human sympathy and why we feel for our fellow human beings, why we behave with them. We treat our friends and family and even a lot of people we don't know in ways that go beyond the demands of markets. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that we live in highly regulated...

highly regulated economically speaking societies. In fact, I think it's getting worse. We live in highly bureaucratized societies. We live in societies in which the state is omnipresent in so many people's lives, including the United States. When I ever hear people talk about America as a sort of laissez-faire and Rand world, I want to say, have you ever been to America? Have you ever dealt with the federal government? Do you know how bad public spending is? Do you understand how inefficient, etc., etc.?

So we are so far removed from anything like the image of a type of liberal utopia, which Hayek talked about at the end of his essay, the intellectuals and socialism. I agree with Paola. I don't like... Is that the essay? Yeah, that's the essay. I don't like it. I think that's a bad ending to that essay because I think that market liberals are very sceptical about...

utopian schemes. Market liberals tend to take human beings as they are, as individual, but also social, as creative, of having the power of reason, of having free will, and also fallible, also fallible. And if you read the classical liberal thinkers, the classic ones, they all talk about this vision of a particular, of the human person, that I think we don't live in societies that actually reflect that.

All right. Thank you very much for that. And with that, I'm afraid I have to draw the session to a close. I know that there were many more questions that people weren't able to ask. But could I just ask you, please, to join me in thanking our speakers for a really fascinating talk. Thank you.

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