The neoliberal movement has a peculiar relationship to wartime and postwar national projects for making "the economy." On the one hand, neoliberalism came into being as a movement of opposition toward "the economy." If the economy was in part a product of Keynesian and other forms of planning, calculation, and management, neoliberalism opposed this with the rival concept of the market, whose principles of operation were portrayed as an alternative to the administrative management of "the economy." On the other hand, as neoliberal think tanks proliferated and began to circulate and promote the ideas of neoliberal academic economists, they became increasingly involved in economic experiments in the world at large. These experiments took place in a world already formatted with the help of economic expertise, whether in the form of earlier Keynesian economic planning or of more recent neoliberal projects.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1919