The Occupy Wall Street movement is often held up as evidence that the Left is hostile to “the free market”—that the Left’s real goal is to protect all of us from the market’s brutal logic. The story goes like this: the Left blames “neoliberalism” for greatly liberating markets from political control, and so producing exploitative forms of globalization that benefit economic elites and corporate interests while placing local communities and the environment at the mercy of supply and demand. The economic crisis, which banks unleashed upon the world in 2008 and appears to be still deepening, was a demonstration of the misery that unregulated markets leave in their wake.

But this picture is a misleading one. neoliberalism was, in fact, never a philosophy aimed simply at liberating markets. The neoliberal intellectual tradition—which emerged out of Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom and gathered momentum at the University of Chicago during the fifties and Sixties—was certainly dedicated to reducing the power of the state over economic life. But very often this was accomplished by transferring power from the public sector directly to corporate and private actors—without the mediation of any market. in other words, the guiding assumption of neoliberalism is not that markets work perfectly, but that private actors make better decisions than public ones.*

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