As a result, neoliberals developed a sociology of knowledge wherein discourses enunciated at different levels preserved the critical philosophy of uncertainty which had been developed in the late 1930s at the core, while frankly embracing an instrumentalist and positivist view of knowledge at the lower end of its channels of distribution. If the epistemological agility afforded by conventionalism eroded some of its founding principles, it nurtured the think tank ideological machines and their capture of the marketplace of ideas. Largely imperceptible, these deliberate epistemic inconsistencies paved the way for the long-term resilience and success of neoliberalism as a social and political ideology.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 93