ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will examine educational reform efforts to shed light on stra-
tegies to obtain and consolidate neoliberal hegemony. We start from the premise
that neoliberalism to a large extent owes its hegemonic position and its political
influence to the significance of the technocratic knowledge of experts and of
knowledge-elites, who succeeded in organizing themselves effectively in a world-
wide web of the neoliberal think tanks. We will devote our attention to the
mechanisms by which the power of knowledge-elites and the power of elitist
knowledge mutually generate, stabilize and build on each other. As a first step we
will reconsider reflections by Pierre Bourdieu on the sociogenesis of neoliberal
technocracy. On this basis, we then argue that the formation and assertion of
neoliberalism came about by means of the successful adjustment strategies that
constituted the reaction of the ruling class to the challenges of the educational
expansion.
