On the theoretical level, early neoliberals sought to distance themselves from the rationalism, empiricism, and naturalism which prevailed in classical liberalism, and to adopt a critical conventionalism, where knowledge and truths were established intersubjectively in a constant process of exchange between theories and the test of experience. As a result, neoliberal thinkers devised a skeptical view of the reach of the social sciences as their prime angle from which to attack competing ideologies promoting an instrumentalist view of knowledge. Paradoxically, they also came to share many premises with the most sophisticated of their adversaries.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 90