Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics

Speaker(s): Dr Daniel Stedman Jones, Professor Mark Pennington, Professor Lord Skidelsky Chair: Professor Stuart Corbridge Recorded on 16 January 2013 in Old Theatre, Old Building. How did American and British policymakers become so enamoured with free markets, deregulation, and limited government? Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, Daniel Stedman Jones has traced the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. He contends that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics. Far from being the story of the simple triumph of right-wing ideas, the neoliberal breakthrough was contingent on the economic crises of the 1970s and the acceptance of the need for new policies by the political left. In his lecture he will describe neoliberalism’s road to power, beginning in interwar Europe, then shifting its centre of gravity after 1945 to the