Taken together, these arguments against the possibility of planning revolved around the elaboration of two key ideas. First, social knowledge is irremediably divided and dispersed. Second, it is a resource that remains largely implicit and tacit. In his seminal article on “Economics and Knowledge” from 1937, Hayek argued that the assumption of perfect knowledge in economic science was eliding the most important question that the social sciences had to address: “how knowledge is acquired and communicated.” Epistemic limitations deriving from the division of knowledge had both scientific and political consequences for just how much one (e.g. the state; the planning board; the welfare economist) was capable of knowing and thus of predicting adequately. Neoliberals shared the same critique of planning based on the impossibility of centralizing information efficiently, and the necessity of letting horizontal adjustments substitute for vertical decisions. But there existed an additional epistemological limit to planning. It was not only that social knowledge could not be centralized in one place, but also that it remained largely implicit, that is, tacitly embedded in traditions and customs.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 72