Despite their irreconcilable political differences, Polanyi and Bernal envisaged in remarkably similar ways the operation of social norms within the scientific community and the paucity of a history of science told as the progressive evolution of intangible ideas. Each argued in their own way “for a social turn in studying the history and philosophy of science.” As a result, the project of recoding liberalism incorporated the growing externalist account of science that sought to reground its history within the social and economic determinants of scientific research and knowledge. Neoliberal philosophers of science largely agreed with the necessity of conceptualizing knowledge and science within their institutional conditions and not as a disembodied process, yet proposed an alternative model for the workings of science which drew its inspiration from economic liberalism: the Republic of Science. In this model, the metaphor of the market played out as the epistemological engine of a largely dispersed and tacit knowledge between individuals, be they scientists, producers, lawyers, or road-users. The rule of law, market regulations, and scientific conventions were conceived as so many analogical methods of social coordination to achieve a liberal social order, as they ensured a variety of ends with minimum direct control. Peculiar to neoliberalism therefore is the strong epistemological bent of its social theory, one where freedom is recoded as instrumental to the activity of separate independent orders working according to analogous principles.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 82