To capture political power, they would first have to alter the intellectual climate. … Hayek proposed that political technologies could be developed to engineer changes in the general climate of opinion. These technologies had to operate on those second-tier thinkers he called "intellectuals." In contrast to the "scholar or expert in a particular field," he wrote in an essay published in 1949 in the University of Chicago Law Review, those who perform intellectual functions—principally journalists and school teachers, but also media commentators, film makers, writers of fiction, and many others—are "second-hand dealers in ideas" (Hayek 1949). These people control the distribution of expert knowledge to ordinary members of the population. The task of the neoliberal movement was to design its own network of dealerships. By altering the distribution of ideas among the second-hand dealers, neoliberalism would try to change the world.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1908