This article constructs a new genealogy for one of the central rhetorical tropes of conservative politics in the United States in recent decades: “job-killing regulation.” Explaining how Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have wielded this slogan so potently in their war against environmental regulation requires us to attend both to the social history of American capitalism and to the history of neoliberal intellectual production. Neoliberal intellectuals, clustered around the Mont Pèlerin Society, began warning in the 1940s that leftist elites sought to sacrifice the livelihoods of the working class for the sake of their anti-industrial aesthetic preferences. But this line of argument gained little cultural or political purchase in the US until the crisis of deindustrialization that erupted in the 1970s, when executives began systematically threatening layoffs in response to new environmental regulations. These threats were mainly pretextual but incompetently handled by regulatory policy makers, creating a political opportunity that Reagan exploited skillfully.

Investment law is an oft-overlooked, yet vital, component of the ideological apparatus upholding the fossil-fuel industry. Despite mounting pressure for divestment, large institutional investors continue to fund fossil-fuel firms, in part, by citing the prudent-person principle (PPP), which requires trustees to act as “prudent persons.” To grasp the rationales underpinning contemporary capitalism, it is fruitful to illuminate the PPP’s history. The genealogy of the principle’s emergence in 1830 and subsequent connections to the Chicago school between 1952 and 1994, reveals its tendency to reinforce predominant market actors and expand financial-market logic. Chicago economists and lawyers disseminated the neoliberal financial theories of modern portfolio theory and the efficient-market hypothesis while tying them to the PPP and promoting its US enactment. During the 1990s and 2000s, regulators and pension fund managers adopted these efforts and successfully lobbied to expand the EU’s financial market through a similar PPP regulation, further consolidating the PPP’s influence in the contemporary financial sphere.

This article develops an intellectual history of neoliberal climate change denial, bringing together scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas with critical research on climate denialism. Focusing on the writings of Deepak Lal (1940–2020), a prominent late neoliberal thinker, the article reconstructs the key arguments Lal developed to throw climate science into question. After situating Lal in relation to neoliberal thought and think tanks, the article explores his views on four key themes: the scientific legitimacy of climatology, the intellectual corruption of climate researchers, the politics of the environmentalist movement, and the concept of imperialism. The article argues that Lal threaded familiar neoliberal concepts and tropes into climate denial, thus articulating a distinctly neoliberal theory of climate change. This theory quickly became influential within the neoliberal movement, segments of which came to echo Lal’s arguments. The article concludes with a broader reflection on neoliberalism’s relation to climate catastrophe.

The introduction to this forum outlines the many ways neoliberal thinkers have apprehended nature over the past century and why this oeuvre has been largely overlooked by historians. The intellectual history of neoliberalism and the study of the environmental crisis have both become sprawling but largely unconnected academic corpuses. This forum has been assembled to act as a conduit and thus help cultivate a new subfield of neoliberal environmental thought. By studying neoliberals as a “thought collective,” an approach pioneered two decades ago by Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen, it becomes possible to perceive how their environmental frameworks were conceived, debated, and disseminated. The existence of a neoliberal thought collective does not mean that there is a single market-conforming approach to managing environmental problems; rather, there is a wide array of frameworks cohered by a shared canon and worldview. The articles in this forum hint at the creativity and eclecticism of neoliberal bricoleurs, whose arguments range from climate denial, to selfish bees, to privatizing the Moon. As editors, we suggest three reasons for studying neoliberal environmental thought: to better perceive and thwart the thought collective’s objectives, to guard oneself against unconsciously adopting “green” neoliberal frameworks, and to engage fruitfully with the work of a worthy adversary to further the construction of post-neoliberal frameworks and their adjunct intellectual infrastructure.

Friedrich Hayek regarded Bernard Mandeville as a founding father of the intellectual lineage to which he belonged. This article offers a countergenealogy of his debt to Mandeville. By reading the two philosophers in parallel, it finds continuities beyond those that Hayek himself identifies, notably in their theorizations of evolutionary progress from animals through human savages to bourgeois civilization. Submission to the market, for Hayek, is essential to the civilizing process. The article reconstructs Mandeville’s arguments concerning the similarities between animals and the “lower” classes and races, via the allegory of the beehive. Hayek, likewise, tended to anthropomorphize insects and other animals. In his conception of the evolutionary ladder, robins compare favorably to some human groups. In such ways, the article suggests, ideologies of class and race left an imprint on Mandeville’s and Hayek’s philosophies of nature and human evolution.

This article is the first to discuss the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank which played a pivotal role within the history of the neoliberal thought collective. Founded in 1974 on the initiative of British Columbian lumber executives, the Fraser Institute was the first organization to draw Canada into the transnational structures of neoliberal thought. Rooted in Canadian soil, the Fraser Institute made a fundamental contribution to the global spread of the neoliberal think tank form. It was the first transplant of an organizational model developed by the British Institute of Economic Affairs and took a leading role in encouraging further proliferation through Atlas. Created in response to local conditions in British Columbia, under the premiership of Bill Bennett, the Fraser Institute was responsible for pioneering experiments in privatization, both responding to and shaping developments in the province’s forest-based economy.

Over the last forty years, analysts at American and British neoliberal think tanks have published a plethora of reports and commentaries celebrating the commercialization of space. This article examines why neoliberal think tanks have developed such a long-term idiosyncratic interest in space policies. I argue that space acts as an affective mobilizer that enables neoliberal ideologues to reactivate their historical ideological struggle against collectivism while simultaneously helping them to rescue the neoliberal project from numerous epistemological threats plaguing it. I first analyze how think tanks’ space activism operates in the context of their concerted struggle since the 1980s against “collectivist” international law. Second, I examine how they use the myth of the space frontier to revive the legitimation of private property as a core pillar of neoliberal thought. The last section analyzes how neoliberal think-tankers have come to offer space as the ideal solution to pressing environmental problems.