Neoliberal legacy intellectuals and the COVID-19 pandemic: Libertarian versus technocratic legitimation

There are unanswered questions about how the COVID-19 pandemic intersects with the trajectory of capitalist institutional and ideological development. We analysed the policy reports, editorials, blog posts and other statements of non-party institutions in the US/UK, the geographical heartland of earlier phases of neoliberal intellectual dominance. In relation to lockdowns, masking and vaccination, we found caveated support for time-limited curbs on economic freedoms. This finding cautions against equating neoliberal intellectual leadership during the pandemic with an ideology of the primacy of freedom as non-interference; insofar as the state was enforcing the demobilization of economy and society, many neoliberal legacy intellectuals accepted temporary curbs on enterprise. This suggests secondary puzzles of how actors and institutions explicitly invested in capitalist liberalization rationalize emergency measures that actively intervene to demobilize the capitalist economy.