This article examines the growing body of scholarship that rejects the long-standing assumption that neoliberalism is fundamentally committed to the valorisation of free markets. While this literature has often proceeded through applied analyses of policy and institutional transformation, the question of whether neoliberalism may nevertheless remain committed to free markets at the level of principle has remained insufficiently resolved. Drawing on a Veblenian institutionalist perspective, this article argues that neoliberalism is more accurately understood as an ideological and institutional project that legitimises and reproduces corporate concentration rather than competitive market exchange. Through a comparative reading of Austrian, Chicago, and Ordoliberal texts, it shows that these traditions, despite beginning from distinct conceptions of markets, converge in their accommodation of monopolistic or highly concentrated corporate forms. Austrian writers express this position most openly, whereas Ordoliberals do so in more qualified terms, yet the overall effect is analogous: large corporations come to represent the most advanced and effective form of market organisation. Read through Veblen’s distinction between industry and business, neoliberalism emerges not as a defence of free competition but as a normative rationalisation of corporate power. The article concludes that an adequate critique of neoliberalism requires its analytical detachment from the mythology of free markets. Keywords: Neoliberalism; Thorstein Veblen; monopoly; corporate power; Austrian School; Chicago School; Ordoliberalism; business enterprise; institutional economics; market ideology JEL code : B25; B52; D40; L12; P16
Mu-Jeong Kho (Sun,) studied this question.