ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to survey the intellectual history of neoliberalism as a form of political activism, explores its superficial use of intellectual ideas against the substantive problematizing work of scholarly inquiry, locates affect as one of its key strategies. As is well documented, the political economic structure of neoliberalism was crafted by an international group of business leaders, economists, philosophers, and journalists who came together immediately after World War II to form the Mont Pèlerin society. After almost two decades of strategizing, their seeds were put into production—they were economically planted in the early 1970s, politically cultivated in the 1980s, and culturally sown in the 1990s. As oppositional politics highlighted the disastrous policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, it seemed important to understand the rhetorical strategies that helped large institutions appeal to so many citizens across the globe.
