This is a deeply disturbing book. It demonstrates at length how the triumph of neoliberal ideology has reached into every corner of our lives: destroying, distorting and redefining so that everything takes a market form. The self is reconstituted as a fragmented set of maximizing actions, and corruption is redefined as exclusive to the state, exculpating market actors from any suspicion of involvement However, Mirowski also writes with an extraordinary sense of humour, the title of the book itself implying a light-heartedness that belies the sometimes frighteningly serious content. He also uses a myriad of neologisms and unexplained cultural references, many of the latter quite bewildering to non-US readers or to those over 35.

That juxtaposition results in a kind of black comedy, and leaves this reviewer in a dilemma. Would Mirowski have strengthened the academic standing of his intellectually powerful account if he had written in more deadpan, orthodox prose? Or does his style enable him to reach a wider public, one that certainly needs to hear his message? Does the humorous style serve to throw into stronger relief the disturbing content, as is the case with the best black humour? I remain undecided on these questions, and therefore pass to the content, which makes this book essential reading for anyone interested in society, economics, politics, psychology, contemporary history or philosophy.

At the centre of the study stands the Mont Pèlerin Society, the neoliberal organization established by Friedrich von Hayek and his associates to promulgate the ideology of the free market. Virtually all significant economists in the US and beyond who have contributed to neoliberal ideas have been members of the Society, and Mirowski describes how it stands at the heart of a wider, more amorphous entity that he calls the Neoliberal Thought Collective. However, it has not spread itself by the power of thought alone, but by acquiring powerful corporate backing. Today it benefits from a complex entanglement of oligopolistic corporate power, academic economists who are more or less on corporate payroll, the US Federal Reserve, and other parts of the US government. Such a combination is anathema to classical liberal thought, and the ways in which contemporary neoliberalism betrays that tradition is an important theme of the book. It is not surprising that some neoliberal economists have devoted articles to demonstrating that, by definition, market actors cannot be corrupt. As Mirowski comments: “The revolving door between the U.S. Treasury and Goldman Sachs was evidence that the market system worked, and not of ingrained corruption and conflicts of interest” (p. 65).

He shows how neoliberalism is a corrupted form of liberalism in a number of ways. The totally uncritical acceptance of oligopolistic corporations, whose dominance prevents markets from working in the perfect information-processing way that the core of neoliberal theory requires, is one example. Another is the way in which, although the initial raison d’être of the Mont Pèlerin project was to reduce the role of the state, the project requires a very strong state to impose a particular kind of market regime and to refashion a number of human relationships so that they can be traded in markets. Although in theory Hayek considered that markets would be the form that human relationships would naturally take if states did not interfere, in reality he and his colleagues campaigned for a strong state that would ensure that markets dominate––with increasing success around the world. Further, Hayek’s ideal strong state was not a democratic one. In a similar manner to Wolfgang Streeck’s recent work on this theme (Gekaufte Zeit, 2014), Mirowski lays bare Hayek’s hostility to democratic institutions.

In contrast to the ostensible conflict between state and market that is often seen to be at the heart of neoliberal theory, Mirowski identifies a different and striking theme. From the Hayekian perspective the market is primarily a store of knowledge. Out of the mass of transactions that contribute to the market emerges all the knowledge that can possibly exist. Governments and others who try to second-guess the market by recourse to experts and professionals are deluding themselves, as their knowledge will always be inferior to that already embodied in the market. Necessarily therefore all attempts to plan or devise social policies through expertise, research findings, or other forms of accumulated wisdom, will produce outcomes inferior to those that emerge from the market. This means that neoliberalism is hostile to and rubbishes all knowledge, except that produced by neoliberal economists, as they are simply the market’s midwives.

This basic stance has several major implications, and one of the most absorbing and powerful contributions of this book is the way in which the author knits these together from disparate sources. For example, if the market is always right, apparent market failures must be the results of either unwise government actions or individual folly. There are therefore excellent discussions of the distorted arguments deployed by economists to show that the 2007-2008 financial crisis was caused by government intervention and not by any flaws in the efficient markets hypothesis. It is also argued that the crisis was the result of people’s stupidity in dealing with their own money. In a creative and perceptive argument, Mirowski relates the popularity of television shows that make people, usually poor people, look dumb to this need of neoliberal society to switch blame away from the market system to its victims.

It also follows that, if the market is the perfect store of knowledge, all aspects of life have to be converted into market form, from what we might otherwise see as collective goods to the most intimate aspects of our personal lives. It is here that Mirowski considers the concept of the fragmented self that a staunch neoliberal society requires. Starting with Foucault’s similar insights on this theme, Mirowski goes further to show that human beings disappear into bundles of investments, marketable skills, temporary alliances, and even perhaps tradable body parts. “Freedom”, in its popular meaning as a call from living, feeling human beings, becomes a set of disembodied, rationally selected opportunities. In the end we have no identity other than that which we derive from the market, as the market contains more knowledge about ourselves than we can acquire through any other means. In a striking passage he demonstrates the cynical meaninglessness of the idea of consumer sovereignty under such circumstances:

That statement is made relatively early in the book, but the vision of human life under neoliberalism that it and much else in the surrounding discussion presents is in some ways at its heart. In later chapters we read how neoliberal economists managed to expel all other approaches to their discipline from journals and university departments, how neoliberal ideas enabled the principal banks to impose the costs of their misbehaviour on to the general public, and many similar scandalous aspects of the neoliberal triumph. But the “heart of darkness” has been established in those earlier discussions of the neoliberal self, which is not a human self at all.

This is an angry book, in that the story it has to tell can only provoke anger in a reader who is not already totally committed to the neoliberal thought collective. The cool and often jocular tone of the author brings out that anger more effectively than a more fulminating style could have done. There is only one way in which the depths of Mirowski’s feelings slightly cloud his judgement. He tends to be very critical of those mainstream economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who have themselves come to oppose many manifestations of the neoliberal project. They have repented too little and too late. While the points he makes here are sound in themselves, when confronting an enemy as powerful as the neoliberal thought collective, one needs all the allies one can find.