La concezione neoliberale della storia: la saldatura tra neoliberismo e revisionismo storico in Friedrich von Hayek

Abstract

While neoliberal policies and their social and political consequences have been widely studied and criticised in the last decades, the historical and theoretical framework of neoliberalism in connection with the liberal tradition as a whole and the more theoretical aspects of its hegemonic construction have received less attention. Even less have been direct, critical discussions of its founders’ texts, and only a small amount of these has been conducted in an actually Marxist perspective. A major exception in this sense, especially in Italy, has been the work of Domenico Losurdo. This article builds on Losurdo’s discussions, which are scattered but numerous in his work, of Friedrich von Hayek’s texts, and tries to employ his method in order to analyse them. The specific aim of this research has been to investigate how Hayek’s neoliberalism and his theory of spontaneous evolution are combined with forms of historical revisionism, such as the re-invention of liberal tradition, the rewriting of the history of modern Europe and of modern political thought, the “idyllic” reconstruction of the early industrial capitalism, the equalization of communism and Nazism and their “orientalisation”, and the obliteration of colonial history. What emerges from this encounter is a full-fledged philosophy of history, a “neoliberal conception of history”, whose elements can still be well recognised in the current public discourse and even in common sense.

Losurdo; Hayek; Neoliberalism; Historical Revisionism; Philosophy of History.