The Thought collective is a simple idea originated by Ludwik Fleck , a Jew who made it through Auschwitz then Belsen. He survived, he thrived. School of thought means much the same but collective is a word that comes to the Marxist mind. Ludwik says they are an obstacle to discovering truth. I am not entirely convinced. The idea is relevant in politics, in understanding group psychology. One collective is Rent A Mob. The collective idea came via Fred, a rather special journalist in his article Darwin Unhinged The Bugs in Evolution; It was published by Ron Unz, another Jew, one with a good brain.
The term has become fashionable among quasi-intellectuals of one sort or another, mainly Lefties. An example is New Left Project, a group of Socialist twerps recycling the same naive and dangerous nonsense as Karl Marx. Find more on this theme at Tales of the Neoliberal Thought Collective or The Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure. Having Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci in company with Milton Friedman & Friedrich von Hayek is problematic.
Ludwik Fleck ex Wiki
Ludwik Fleck (11 July 1896 – 5 June 1961) was a Polish and Israeli physician and biologist who did important work in epidemic typhus in Lwów, Poland, with Rudolf Weigl[1] and in the 1930s developed the concept of the "Denkkollektiv" ("thought collective").The concept of the "thought collective" is important in the philosophy of science and in logology (the "science of science"), helping to explain how scientific ideas change over time, much as in [ the Jew ] Thomas Kuhn's later notion of the "paradigm shift" and in [ homosexual patter merchant ] Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme"...........
Thought collectives
Fleck wrote that the development of truth in scientific research was an unattainable ideal as different researchers were locked into thought collectives (or thought-styles). A "truth" was a relative value, expressed in the language or symbolism of the thought collective in which it belonged, and subject to the social and temporal structure of this collective. To state therefore that a specific truth is true or false is impossible. It is true in its own collective, but incomprehensible or unverifiable in most others. He felt that the development of scientific insights was not unidirectional and does not consist of just accumulating new pieces of information, but also in overthrowing the old ones. This overthrowing of old insights is difficult because a collective attains over time a specific way of investigating, bringing with it a blindness to alternative ways of observing and conceptualization. Change was especially possible when members of two thought collectives met and cooperated in observing, formulating hypothesis and ideas. He strongly advocated comparative epistemology. This approach anticipated later developments in social constructionism, and especially the development of critical science and technology studies.
New Left Project
The research you’ve been involved in has discovered a much greater diversity of ideas and policy prescriptions within neoliberalism than is normally assumed in critical writing. What unites neoliberals and does it make sense to think of neoliberalism as one coherent body of thought?We were concerned that many of the critiques of neoliberalism focused on the straw man of anti-statism, or were directed against the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan governments, or the Washington Consensus for example. We regarded these critiques as slightly problematic because whilst it is true that in public certain neoliberal ideas have been expressed very bluntly and stated more as a political message, in fact such statements often contradict much of the research and writing of key neoliberals.
So for example in neoliberal writing you don’t really find an argument that the state should be destroyed, which comes from anarcho-libertarians. James Buchanan writes that neoliberals are not in favour of removing the state and establishing a pure market society. He refines the neoliberal critique of the state to suggest that it’s much more important to be clear as to what kind of state you want – which is a state that protects private property and so on. Even the Virginia School people, the public choice school, that theoretically considers ‘state failure’ as the key to understanding the modern state, is not in favour of destroying the state............
It goes on.
Tales of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
Presidential aspirant Ron Paul stopped by The Washington Post last week. As Dana Milbank reported in the Post, barely fifteen minutes into his question-and-answer session, Paul was speaking Austrian.“I mean, how many people have read Human Action?” the former obstetrician asked, referring to a 1949 treatise by Ludwig von Mises. “How many people have studied Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and Sennholz? … A lot of people just flat out don’t understand what I’m talking about.”
The candidate proceeded to expound, as Milbank related, “the need for a gold standard, the problem with energy-efficient light bulbs, why Greece should declare bankruptcy, why Grover Cleveland was his favorite president, and how our economy is collapsing, ‘just like the Soviet system.’”
The same day the Republican leadership sent a letter to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, warning him not to take further steps to improve the US economy before the election.
Two very different skeins of thought were in conjunction here – in the one case, an unusually candid argument from political dogma; in the other, a purely practical gambit having to do with the ascendancy to power of the Tea Party since the 2010 Congressional election.
They are connected, of course, connected, too, to a third edifice, one that is the subject of a fascinating book, The Road from Mont Pélerin: the Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, edited by Philip Mirowski, of the University of Notre Dame, and Dieter Plehwe, of the Social Science Research Center in Berlin.
Readers may already know something of the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, in a little Swiss village of that name above Lake Geneva in April 1947. Organized by Austrian refugee Friedrich von Hayek, bankrolled by the Foundation for Economic Education, an early think tank in Irvington-on-Hudson, NY (at which Hayek’s fellow refugee Mises was employed), the weeklong session attracted thinkers from around the world who were worried about post-war tendencies to bureaucratic planning and technocratic socialism.
Mont Pelerin Society ex Wiki
The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) is an international organization composed of economists (including eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences), philosophers, historians, intellectuals, business leaders, and others committed to their understanding of personal and political freedom.[2] Its founders included Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman.[2] The society advocates freedom of expression, free market economic policies, the political values of an open society. The members see the Society as an effort to interpret in modern terms the fundamental principles of economic society as expressed by those classical economists, political scientists, and philosophers who have inspired many in Europe, America and throughout the Western World. [1]
The Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure
QUOTE
Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism ‘does not exist’?In this paper I examine the disinclination to treat the Neoliberal political project as a serious intellectual project motivating a series of successes in the public sphere. Economists seem especially remiss in this regard.
UNQUOTE
Neoliberals are just the same old Socialist loud mouths who tell us that they know how to run our lives better than we do.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP23-Mirowski.pdf