The Pinochet regime fostered highly personalized channels of communication with the “economic change team” and allowed it a high degree of autonomy in the pursuit of neoliberal planning activities and structural reforms. This has been confirmed by insiders such as the “godfather” of the Chicago boys, Arnold Harberger: “Given that there was a military government, the idea that they were willing to cede economic authority to a group of technocrats made that transition easier than it would have been in a democratic context of the same time and place” (Harberger 1999). Yet Harberger did not subscribe to the perspective of scholars who argued that a radical break with long-established institutional arrangements and the exaction of high social costs involved in the neoliberal adjustment process necessarily required an authoritarian political system (Foxley 1986; Martínez and Díaz 1996). To counter the position of these scholars, Harberger cited the experience of other countries that had carried out neoliberal reforms: “Then what happened is that one democratic government after another in Latin America adopted virtually identical reforms. . . . So you can’t say that these reforms are inevitably shackled to a military government” (Harberger 1999).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1542