Mannheim represented one of the most potent intellectual adversaries of early neoliberals because he advertised planning not as a rejection of liberalism but as its most advanced stage, in line with scientific modernity. … From Hayek’s intention to found the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed group of like-minded individuals to his 1949 article on “Intellectuals and Socialism,” neoliberals embraced a sociology of knowledge at the service of their ideological project. What Hayek identified as the hubris of the sociologist would ironically be the position he aimed at occupying with the Mont Pèlerin Society.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 89