Whereas neoliberalism is often presented as an internally consistent and unified ideology, the case of monetary order belies this impression. While the final message may have been that “there is no alternative,” debates took place first about what that one policy option was, to which there is no alternative. Indeed, the rather complicated, arcane, and seemingly technical question of the international monetary system was the most controversial and divisive among organized neoliberals in the postwar decades. It resulted in the longest and most contentious internal controversy between two fundamentally opposed camps that dominated many of the yearly MPS meetings in the postwar period and threatened to split the emerging neoliberal international in the course of the 1960s. Thus, even as it documents a considerable policy victory, this chapter shows that neoliberals did not always speak with a single voice.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 410