Strategies of neoliberal knowledge production: how did free-market think tanks react to the COVID-19 pandemic?

The actions states took in response to the Covid-19 pandemic posed serious questions about the role of the state in the economy and posed a challenge to neoliberals invested in defending and re-asserting neoliberalism. This paper seizes the pandemic as an opportunity to examine how neoliberals react to modern crises, how they may attempt to re-establish neoliberalism and what role neoliberal ideas play within those processes. It analyses outputs from ten neoliberal think tanks in Germany and the UK and interviews with members of those think tanks to trace neoliberals’ narratives of the crisis and the ways in which neoliberal ideas are wielded to construct these. It finds that for neoliberal think tanks ideological adherence is the key strategy, enabling the construction of a cohesive narrative about the pandemic across various schools of neoliberal thought and country contexts, adjustable through the variations within neoliberalism to specific policy environments. Brief major disagreements did not affect this overarching narrative and, interpreted as matters of principle, instead strengthened self-perceptions of a communal ‘liberal’ identity. Neoliberal ideas form the cornerstone of neoliberal think tanks’ work in large part because they are strategically useful for the production, coordination and attempts at dissemination of neoliberal knowledge.