Although the role of national institutions is indispensable in explaining the advance (or retardation) of specific doctrines across countries, as Peter Hall's (1989) book on Keynesianism has shown, the origins and the advance of neoliberalism cannot be explained without careful consideration of the transnational discourse community created by the founders of the Mont Pèlerin Society. … Whereas leading neoliberals denied any possibility of mere mortals outcompeting the market as processors of highly dispersed knowledge, their own efforts succeeded in constructing and deploying elaborate social machinery designed to collect, create, debate, disseminate, and mobilize neoliberal ideas. By doing so, they greatly advanced the understanding of a modern reengineered division of intellectual labor with proper roles assigned to academic and other professionals, in what amounts to a new technology of persuasion.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2118