While the starting point of this chapter was that ideas matter, we have not focused on the nature of those ideas per se. Instead we illuminated the conditions in which ideas can be made to matter. Ideas do not float nor do they do things by themselves. They are championed, carried, inscribed organizationally and institutionally, fought over, appropriated, and interpreted. Only then can they come to have an impact. This chapter has shown the performance of the conditions necessary for ideas to have an impact transnationally—a performance, in large part, comprising organization building, network creation, and community integration. The deployment of an organizational architecture is a necessary precondition for the influence of ideas. Only through the careful work of reconstructing lines of funding, organizing, network building, and influence framing can we understand the globalization of neoliberalism as a coherent body of thought and of self-conscious policy activism.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 605