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The origins of neoliberalism between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism: “A galaxy without borders”

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Abstract

Scholars have argued that transnational networks of right-wing economists and activists caused the worldwide embrace of neoliberalism. Using the case of an Italian think tank, CESES, associated with these networks, the author shows that the origins of neoliberalism were not in hegemony but in liminality. At CESES, the Italian and American right sought to convert Italians to free market values by showing them how Soviet socialism worked. However, CESES was created in liminal spaces that opened up within and between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Scholars from East and West at CESES developed new knowledge about actually existing socialism, which, due to the shifting context of the Cold War, seemed to provoke left-wing sympathies among the scholars and the students involved. CESES in fact required left-wing scholars, who had necessary skills and a fascination with a common project of democratic or market socialism, to create this new knowledge. The new knowledge that developed out of an East–West dialogue not only helped right-wing transnational networks to reorient their hegemonic projects, but also helped those on the left to understand actually existing socialism and what socialism might become. This knowledge could not be obtained without this dialogue and had to travel through liminal spaces.

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Notes

  1. The epistemic communities literature also examines the ways that new economic ideas influence policy through networks of knowledge-based experts (e.g., Hall 1989).

  2. American liberalism also employed a strong state, but neoliberalism differs in that it seeks to disembed capital from Keynesian state ownership and state redistribution (Harvey 2005: 10–11).

  3. CESES was known as either Centro studi economici e sociali or Centro studi e ricerche su problemi economico-sociali.

  4. CESES programs were funded by the William Volker Fund, the Scaife Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Relm Foundation (Moore 2003: 23).

  5. Library of Congress, William J. Baroody, Sr., Papers, confidential memorandum to W. J. Baroody and others from G. W. [Warren] Nutter, Subject: CESES Seminar, Florence, September 14–16, 1966. September 29, 1966, pp. 5–6. Reprinted from Bockman and Eyal (2002), p. 336.

  6. The author conducted the interviews with 14 Italian participants in the summers of 2004 and 2005, with 6 American participants from 2000 to 2002, and with 2 Hungarian participants: 1 in 2000 and the other in 2002. The archival research was conducted in summer 2005 at the Confindustria Historical Archives located in Rome, Italy. The Confindustria Historical Archives are referred to as “Confindustria” in the footnotes. All translations were made by the author.

  7. Not everyone wanted convergence, but many predicted convergence would happen. Convergence theory appeared earlier too, such as in the work of Kautsky and those associated with the Labor and Socialist International (Kelley 1973: 174).

  8. Soviet officials had a kind of convergence theory, in which capitalism would evolve into socialism and then communism (Prybyla 1964: 4–5).

  9. Douglas (1966) argues, “To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at the source of power” (p. 97).

  10. My approach is similar to that of Callon (1998), Latour (1988, 1999), Mitchell (1990, 2002), and Ross (2002), who seek to reconnect the heterogeneous networks that create knowledge.

  11. Chabot and Duyvendak (2002) have shown the shallowness of most understandings of transnational diffusion, which see knowledge as fully formed, flowing from the USA or the West to the Rest, and used unproblematically in the new environment. Globalization theorists who criticize the theses of cultural imperialism and related global homogenization support the arguments made by Chabot and Duyvendak (Hannerz 1997; Tomlinson 1999; Tsing 2001).

  12. For example, Friedrich von Hayek changed his ideas in response to developments in actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe. He based his earlier work on a dichotomy between classical liberalism and central planning. With the emergence of market socialism in Eastern Europe, he developed a new understanding of classical liberalism in opposition to market socialism, as can be seen in his final book The Fatal Conceit published in 1988 (Shearmur 1996: 73). Boettke (2001) agrees that the debate about the possibility of socialism allowed Austrian school economists to develop their understanding of markets: “It is this debate that taught the Austrian economists how their understanding of the market system differed from their neoclassical colleagues” (p. 5, italics in the original text).

  13. Knowledge production is in fact most intense along borders because “the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” Martin Heidegger, “Building, dwelling, thinking,” quoted in Bhabha (1994), p. 1. Many excellent studies of the cultural cold war have started from a study of the intentions of the Cold War superpowers (e.g., Scott-Smith 2002; Saunders 2000). Rather than assume the Cold War divisions between East and West, this article examines knowledge production that can only take place on borders and in liminal spaces.

  14. Confindustria 15.1/1, File A. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67,File 1964, inner file “Seminario CESES,” Letter from Vittorio De Biasi to Dr. Furio Cicogna, Nov. 6, 1964. According to this letter, the costs of the first year, 1964, would be 125 million lire.

  15. Confindustria 15.1/1. File A. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67. File 1964, inner file “Seminario CESES,” “Relazione sull’Activitá del CESES,” Oct. 7, 1964. Attachment 3: “Schema operativo di un centro di studi sui problemi del socialismo,” p. 1.

  16. Ibid.

  17. One CESES participant noted that if CESES founders had wanted to convert East Europeans to capitalism they would have discussed Western capitalism directly (Author’s interview, May 28, 2004).

  18. As a reflection of the importance of Sovietology to Confindustria, according to one observer, there was a central committee of top-level Confindustria industrialists – called by some “the 12 apostles of Christ” – in which one of the “apostles” was tasked to develop the study of Communism (Pistolese 1996: 5–6).

  19. Confindustria 15.1/1. File A: Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67.File 1966. File: Corrispondenza, “Relazione sulle finalità e attività del CESES,” July 18, 1966, p. 13.

  20. These unsigned notes were most likely written by Gennaro Pistolese. Confindustria 15.1/1, File A. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67, File: 1966, File: Seminario Internationazionale di Firenze: 14/16-9-66, “Appunto per il Segretario Generale,” n. 131, Sept. 19, 1966, p. 5.

  21. Giuliano Cittanti, a participant in the CESES courses, reported his criticisms to Confindustria. His report is described in Confindustria 15.1/1, CESES B., File: 1968, File: Programma, “CESES – Corso propedeutico Ottobre 1967, Relazione Dicembre 1967 del dott. Cittanti (Ferrara),” Jan. 16, 1968.

  22. Confindustria 15.1/1. CESES B, File 1968, File: Programma. Letter from Vittorio De Biasi to Dr. Angelo Costa, President of Confindustria, Jan. 16, 1968.

  23. Confindustria 15.1/12. Letter from Luigi Valenti of the Centro Studi Attivita Economiche to Vittorio De Biasi, Oct. 31, 1969.

  24. As Oushakine (2001) has shown, dissidents’ oppositional discourse was not separate from the official discourse, but rather mimicked this discourse. Similarly, Burawoy (1992) writes, “Rather than endorsing alternative values, the working class embraced the regime’s values as its own, which became a basis for opposition to the regime’s actual practice” (p. 777).

  25. In the literature, there seems to be some agreement that about 200,000 people left the PCI between 1956 and 1958 (Bracke and Jorgensen 2002: Appendix; Galli 2000: 51; Groppo and Riccamboni 1987: 112). However, people also left the PCI before 1956 (Blackmer 1975: 54).

  26. Mieli (1996) remembered that it was difficult for him and many other former “communists by profession” to find work after leaving the PCI because many did not trust ex-communists and the “anti-communists” felt satisfied by the PCI crisis without doing anything to help the ex-communists (pp. 122-124).

  27. In 1964, Mieli had written a book with many others on the Italian Communists who had died during the Stalinist purges. After quoting Rosa Luxemburg calling for freedom of thought, the authors identified themselves as “militants of the Italian workers movement” (Zaccaria 1964: 7).

  28. In 1964, Mieli published his revelations about Togliatti’s official role in the killing of Polish Communist Party members, after, Mieli claims, being inspired by Khrushchev’s revelations (Mieli 1988: 17).

  29. Urbinati and Canto-Sperber (2004) and the translations edited by Urbinati (Gobetti 2000; Rosselli 1994) reveal the Italian tradition of bringing together liberalism and socialism. In this article, I am speaking about a broader and more heterogeneous group than just liberal socialists.

  30. Caffi lived from 1887 to 1955. Caffi was exiled from Russia, after his participation in the 1905 revolution, and saw himself as on the left. Caffi returned to the Soviet Union and worked there in the early 1920s only to leave again after being arrested. In Italy, Caffi worked against the Mussolini government and was tortured by the Nazis in prison (Bianco 1977).

  31. Before working at CESES, Gino Bianco was the editor of Critica Sociale, the main journal of the autonomous socialist movement. Galli had also written for this journal (Galli 2000: 21). The autonomous socialist movement sought to be independent from the Soviet socialist movement and was formed long before Antonio Negri’s Autonomia Operaia emerged in 1973 (Wright 2002). One of the editors at CESES, Alfredo Azzaroni, later became the editor of Metropoli, a journal of this later Autonomia movement.

  32. Caffi and his close colleague Nicola Chiaromonte had much earlier talked about establishing a small publishing house, a journal, and a commune (Bianco 1977: 90). Chiaromonte popularized Caffi’s ideas in the USA while working at the politics journal, which included Dwight McDonald, Mary McCarthy, and Gaetano Salvemini (Sumner 1996).

  33. Author’s interviews: May 19, 2004; May 20, 2004; July 22, 2005.

  34. Author’s interview, May 28, 2004. Another person in the CESES youth programs said that CESES hoped to create a “pragmatic” political elite like those in the American political system, where elites, according to this view, could have debate (Author’s interview, May 17b, 2004).

  35. This group defined themselves as laico. While laico means secular, some Italian intellectuals have denied that it is anti-religious and have expanded its meaning to include European liberalism (e.g., Giorello 2005).

  36. The journals included Il Politecnico, Mondo operaio, Il Ponte, Comunita (later Critica sociologica), Nord e Sud, Il Mondo, Tempo Presente, Problemi del socialismo, Rivista storia del socialismo, and Tempi Moderni (Tranfaglia 2005: 279–289).

  37. Mieli (1984) himself had long been committed to a Popperian process of reevaluation of his political beliefs and called for the use of the “experimental method” in politics in order to verify one’s political beliefs in a laboratory (p. 146).

  38. To build a grassroots-based public sphere outside conventional politics and the Cold War blocs, intellectuals sought to create numerous organizations including the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Recontres internationales de Geneve, and Societa europea di cultura. Norberto Bobbio (1999) worked in the 1950s with these organizations to reunite Europe and considered those who sought out East–West connections as naturally on the left. Berghahn (2001) finds similar characteristics among a smaller group of intellectuals around the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

  39. Gramsci’s “war of position” reflected a widespread Italian belief in the need to wage a cultural war to control civil society. The CESES founders had also worked in journals of either the PCI or the international communist movement as leaders of the cultural wing of the PCI, and thus were well acquainted with the PCI’s strategies.

  40. The Kennedy and the Johnson Administrations had also supported liminal spaces because they were seen as a way to combat communism. The CIA and other American government agencies used those from the anti-communist left, through such organizations as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to fight the cultural Cold War (Scott-Smith 2002; Saunders 2000). However, by 1964, American funding priorities had changed, and CESES could find support only from the American New Right.

  41. According to Wald (1987), the “New York Intellectuals” abandoned their Trotskyist origins to embrace Cold War liberalism and then neoconservativism. Critics of Wald have pointed out the more complex nature of the American anti-Stalinist left and found that the path from Trotskyism to neoconservativism describes only a part of this group (e.g., Lipsitz 1988, Wolfe 1988).

  42. See footnote 1. The attempts to bring together these groups into umbrella parties continued to fail throughout the Cold War (Bobbio 1999; De Grand 1989).

  43. Confindustria 15.1/1. File A. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67. File 1966. File: Corrispondenza. Letter from Vittorio De Biasi to Dr. Angelo Costa, July 19, 1966.

  44. Similarly, American foundations sought to export American social science to Europe “in hopes of discouraging the expansion of Marxism in social and political studies” and strengthening “Western democracies using the social sciences to stimulate social and economic reform” (Gemelli and Row 2003: 183).

  45. From 1967 to 1971, CESES also published Notizie Est, a news service for newspapers and magazines, and a book series, Cultura Libera. In the Cultura Libera series, CESES published 17 books, including Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Francois Fejto, Hannah Arendt, Neil J. Smelser’s Theory of Collective Behavior, and Adam Ulam’s work on the Russian Revolution. While one might have expected CESES to highlight Hayek’s and Friedman’s works, the CESES report of its activities in 1969 noted the “most significant works” in the series: Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism and J. Thayer’s Italy and the Great War. Confindustria 1969–70. File: CESES: Relazioni. “Relazione sull’attività svolta nel 1969,” p. 10. One CESES participant remembered that only 70 copies were made of some of the Cultura Libera books (Author’s interview, June 4, 2004).

  46. CESES was consciously modeled on the Cattaneo Institute in Bologna, which opened in 1956 and became a center for empirical social science research focused on the Italian educational system and electoral politics (Catanzaro 2000; Galli 2000: 101). Cattaneo imported American social science, after establishing a relationship with the Kennedy Administration and American foundations. Giorgio Galli had worked at Cattaneo before joining CESES. Similar to CESES, Cattaneo and its related publishing house Il Mulino published social science journals and books, trained students and young professors in social science methods, and conducted social science research.

  47. Confindustria 15.1/1, “Appunto per il Segretario Generale,” n. 131, Sept. 19, 1966, p. 5.

  48. Author’s interviews: May 19, 2004; June 3, 2004.

  49. Author’s interviews: May 17b, 2004; May 19, 2004; August 13, 2004.

  50. Confindustria 15.1/12. Newspaper clip**s sent Aug. 5, 1970. Pino Querenghi, “Dove passano i confini della mappa del potere,” La Voce Repubblicana, July 24/25, 1970.

  51. Gleason (1995) considers Robert Tucker the person who initiated this revolution: “Tucker was the first to express a feeling that was almost certainly more broadly shared: that study of the Soviet Union was taking place in too isolated an arena. He contended that a more comparative approach was necessary, since the comparison entailed in totalitarianism, primarily that between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, was too narrow” (p. 128). The American Council of Learned Societies invested large sums of money in the development of comparative Communist studies through new publications, associations, and retooling in the 1960s, while American Political Science Association and other associations had broad debates about the future of Sovietology (Fleron 1969: 28). In comparative economics, Gregory Grossman was one of the pioneers and a long-time participant in CESES international economic seminars.

  52. The Gramsci Institute worked on historical and political topics. The Feltrinelli Institute studied historical topics. The Trieste Institute for the Study and Documentation on Eastern Europe (ISDEE) focused primarily on trade.

  53. Sovietology and earlier Slavic studies had long existed in Italy. Slavic studies were associated with Mazzini Europeanism and then were used by the Italian fascist state in its attempts to take over Eastern Europe (Santoro 2003).

  54. Author’s interview: May 19, 2004 and May 31c, 2004.

  55. Author’s interview, May 31a, 2004. Many Italian students went abroad to do graduate work. While some went to the USA or England, others went to Poland and Hungary, where the most exciting innovations in economics were happening in the 1960s.

  56. Even in 1993, Motyl remarked “[e]xcept for the Smolensk materials and a smattering of other documents, until recently scholars had no direct and unimpeded access to Soviet archives. Soviet evidence filtered, screened, selected, misrepresented” (Motyl 1993, p. 85).

  57. Author’s interview, May 31a, 2004. It was even better to travel to Eastern Europe. CESES participants used their contacts with East Europeans to organize research trips to Eastern Europe and meet a wide range of specialists there.

  58. Author’s interviews: May 17a, 2004 and May 20, 2004.

  59. Barghoorn (1960) writes, “roughly from 1948 to 1953 – most of the contacts between Russia and the noncommunist world, especially Western Europe and America, were between Soviet delegations and foreign communists or fellow-traveler groups, or between visiting groups composed mainly or at least partly of such persons and Soviet communist party and government agencies” (p. 16).

  60. Author’s interview (May 20, 2004) and Staffa (1975).

  61. One CESES participant told me that he had “credibility” with those on the left because his scientific works revealed “socialist values.” Author’s interview, May 28, 2004.

  62. The CESES press office also sought to “reveal problems that do not have a solution” (inside cover of Documentazione sui Paesi dell’Est 1965), which drove them to trawl the less censored provincial papers looking for these problems. The CESES leadership determined, “We have reason to think that only CESES, in Italy, is able to supply news and information that only systematic scrutiny of the minor presses of the USSR and the satellites allows.” Confindustria 15.1/1. File A. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67. File 1964, File Seminario CESES. “Relazione sull’actività del CESES,” Oct. 7, 1964. p. 5.

  63. Author’s interviews: May 17a, 2004 and May 31a, 2004.

  64. Author’s interview: May 17a, 2004.

  65. Engerman (2003) shows that Americans and Russians shared an interest in planning and modernization since the nineteenth century. After the Second World War, economists in East and West proved that competitive market solutions were mathematically similar to optimal solutions calculated in a planning system. Economists across the Iron Curtain thus found themselves sharing a common project.

  66. Confindustria 15.1/1, File A: Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964–67, File: 1964, inner file Seminario CESES, “Notes for the General Secretary,” N. 243, Nov. 13, 1964, p. 1.

  67. Confindustria 15.1/1, File A. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1964-67. File 1964, inner file Seminario CESES. “Notes for the General Secretary,” N. 240, Nov. 12, 1964. p. 2.

  68. He also visited Yugoslavia in 1962 where he conducted research at a Yugoslavian bank and gave talks. Friedman and Friedman (1998) wrote, “One of our major interests during successive visits was how worker ownership functioned. That led to visits to a number of enterprises and extensive discussion with their managements” (p. 293). During his 1967 visit to Yugoslavia, Friedman traveled with Warren Nutter before a CESES meeting (Ibid, p. 423).

  69. In interviews, CESES participants insisted that knowledge about the East Bloc was necessary for understanding Italy. For example, one had to understand the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in order to understand the PCI. The reforms in Eastern Europe were seen as equally applicable in Italy. Author’s interviews: June 4, 2004; July 19, 2005; July 22, 2005. The quotation above comes from a CESES report on the proceedings of its international economics conference on economic planning in 1968. Confindustria 15.1/1, File B. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1968–70. File 1969–1970. File: CESES: Relazioni – Programmi Giovani – Bilancio, “Relazione sull’attività svolta nel 1969,” p. 9.

  70. Confindustria 15.1/1, File B. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1968–70, File 1968, File: Programma activita CESES 1968; Corso formazione giovani, “Appunto per il segretario generale,” N. 3, Jan. 12, 1968, p. 6. “The ‘proof’ could be offered above all by those who were witnesses of various experiences collected personally.” Confindustria 15.1/1, “CESES – Corso propedeutico Ottobre 1967, Relazione Dicembre 1967 del dott. Cittanti (Ferrara),” p. 6.

  71. Confindustria, “Appunto per il Segretario Generale,” N. 131, p. 3.

  72. Ibid, p. 2

  73. Ibid.

  74. Confindustria 15.1/1. “CESES – Corso propedeutico Ottobre 1967, Relazione Dicembre 1967 del dott.Cittanti (Ferrara),” Jan. 16, 1968, p. 7.

  75. Confindustria 15.1/12. “Un ‘Bisturi Analitico’: Storia del Ceses,” Il Gazzettino, July 21, 1970.

  76. As Shapin (1994) points out, social theory assumes that objectivity comes from the solitary intellectual or the stranger free from social ties, which “allowed truth to be looked directly in the face and told to others” (p. 40). However, as Shapin argues, free action required for objectivity is based on extensive social ties and trust. Similarly, Jasanoff (2004) writes, “Scientific knowledge, in particular, is not a trascendent mirror of reality. It both embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions – in short, in all the building blocks of what we term the social.” (p. 3).

  77. Similar to CESES, the conservative Italian funders of the Cattaneo Institute and its related publishing house Il Mulino sought to create an anti-communism of the right, but instead found the participants to be “a-communists of the left” and, in response, stopped the funding in the mid-1960s (Catanzaro 2000: 6). By the time CESES sought funding, American mainstream foundations had already turned their focus from independent social science research institutes and towards funding Italian university reform and European integration studies (Gemelli and Row 2003).

  78. Mieli (1996) wrote, “I wanted to liberate myself from false truth. I wanted to know how things really happened in the Communist world. What was the real history?” (p. 127).

  79. Carlo Ripa di Meana (2000) left CESES in 1966 because he did not like the shift from Sovietology to changing Italian politics (p. 119).

  80. CESES continually (and unsuccessfully) proposed to expand this program to train 100 youths, who would then establish regional CESES branches and spread CESES training throughout all the regions of Italy. Confindustria 15.1/12. “Progetto: Nuovo programma per la formazione dei giovani,” n.d.

  81. Confindustria, “CESES – Corso propedeutico Ottobre 1967, Relazione Dicembre 1967 del dott. Cittanti (Ferrara),” p. 1.

  82. Confindustria 15.1/12. Letter to Luigi Valenti from Vittorio De Biasi, Nov. 13, 1969, p. 2.

  83. Confindustria 15.1/12. Letter from Luigi Valenti to Vittorio De Biasi, Oct. 31, 1969, p. 1.

  84. Confindustria 15.1/1, File B. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1968–70. File 1969–1970, CESES: Relazioni – Programmi Giovani – Bilancio, Untitled. By 1966, De Biasi had already planned to invite “socialist and communist” speakers to participate in the courses “because they could be subjected to criticism.” Confindustria Archives, 15.1/1. File: Corso Propedeutico: November 1966, “Appunto per il Segretario Generale,” Nov. 21, 1966, No. 178. One former student remembered four to six teachers “from the left” at the 1968 courses (Author’s interview, May 17b, 2004).

  85. A short biography can be found at the website of Archivio storico del Senato della Repubblica. 2006. Catalogo delle pubblicazioni dell’Archivio storico, 2002-2006, p. 14. http://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/relazioni/archiviostorico/catalogo_archiviostorico.pdf.

  86. His works Il dissenso nel PCI (1978) e La partitocrazia invisibile (1985) reflect his critical stance. He was arrested during the Clean Hands investigation. “Tangenti, condannato Ugo Finetti. L’ex segretario psi accusato da Chiesa,” Corriere della Sera May 15, 1997.

  87. A former student remembered Seniga as a teacher at CESES (Author’s interview, May 17b, 2004).

  88. Spriano is famous for numerous works on the PCI, including Storia del Partito comunista italiano (1967) [History of the Italian Communist Party].

  89. Confindustria 15.1/1. File B. Centro Studi e Ricerche su problemi economico-sociali, CESES, 1968–70. File 1968. File: Programma activita CESES 1968; Corso formazione giovani. “Il Marxismo: Teori e Prassi, Secondo Corso Propedeutico, Milano, 6–18 Novembre 1967.”

  90. CESES also offered at least one course on economics in 1970. File: Corrispondenza. Letter from Renato Mieli to Mario Morelli (secretary general of Confindustria), Feb. 3, 1970.

  91. Confindustria, “Appunto per il Segretario Generale,” N. 131, p. 4.

  92. This information about Galli comes from his autobiography: Galli (2000).

  93. Confindustria, “Relazione sull’attività svolta nel 1969,” p. 3.

  94. Confindustria, “Relazione sull’attività svolta nel 1969,” Attachment: “Elenco delle ricerche effettuate nel 1969 nell’ambito del Programma Giovani.”

  95. Confindustria 15.1/12. Letter from Luigi Valenti to Vittorio De Biasi, Dec. 29, 1969, p. 2.

  96. Confindustria 15.1/12. Letter from Luigi Valenti to Vittorio De Biasi, Oct. 31, 1969, p. 1 and Letter from Luigi Valenti to Vittorio De Biasi, Dec. 29, 1969, p. 2.

  97. However, Confindustria regional offices could not always find students, so CESES often invited students suggested by former CESES participants.

  98. Confindustria 15.1/12. Letter from Vittorio De Biasi to Luigi Valenti, Nov. 13, 1969, p. 2.

  99. This information about the CESES students comes from Galli (2000: 105–108). Maurizio Vaudagna’s professional appointments as an American history professor can be found at this website: http://www.lett.unipmn.it/docenti/vaudagna/default_en.htm.

  100. However, at least one American foundation did continue to pay for American scholars to travel to CESES international economic conferences until at least 1982 (Letter requesting payment from an American participant to Dr. John H. Moore at The Hoover Institution, Sept. 18, 1982). Many reasons have been given for the end of Confindustria’s funding: Soviet pressure on Italian industrialists who wanted Soviet business Finetti (2004), general economic crisis (Paolo Savona, personal correspondence), disagreement over Mieli’s focus on research (Pistolese 1996: 6), and the historic compromise between the PCI and the DC (Author’s interview, July 22, 2005).

  101. One interviewee mentioned funding from the Bank of Italy, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the city of Milan (Author’s interview, May 21, 2004).

  102. Mitchell (1990) uses the concept of “enframing” (1990: 547). Similarly, to Douglas (1966), symbolic boundary maintenance seeks to turn the liminal and ambiguous into the category of the sacred, removing its ambiguity.

  103. Economists and other social scientists living in the USA had access to significant financial and professional resources and dominated the network, seeing those in the periphery as providing information and data, rather than theory or knowledge (Bockman and Eyal 2002; Fourcade 2006). Scholars of post-colonial studies have shown how the core appropriates knowledge developed in the periphery or on borders. In relation to social science research particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, though applicable at other times as well, Appadurai (2001) has argued that at this time “Theory and method were seen as naturally metropolitan, modern, and Western. The rest of the world was seen in the idiom of cases, events, examples, and test sites in relation to this stable location for the production or revision of theory” (pp. 4–5).

  104. Ferguson (1994) and Zimmerman (2005) discuss how colonial ideologies failed but in their failure succeeded in creating their desired outcome.

  105. As Mitchell (2002) writes, “the violent, the actual, and the exceptional – all of which the law denounces and excludes, ruptures itself from and supersedes – are never gone. They make possible the rupture, the denunciation, and the order” (p. 79).

  106. Burawoy (1992) predicted that “[b]y digging an ever-wider chasm between ideology and reality, between promise and actuality, capitalism will once more fertilize the socialist imagination” (p. 785).

  107. In 1984, with the end of the CESES international conferences, CESES participants formed the Italian Association for the Study of Comparative Economic Systems (AISSEC). The first leaders in EACES were overwhelming CESES participants: Vittorio Valli, Bruno Dallago, Alberto Chilosi, Silvana Malle, and D. Mario Nuti. Vittorio Valli was the first president, and many other CESES participants became future presidents. http://eaces.gelso.unitn.it/eaces/briefhis.htm.

  108. The IAFEP was originally created in Yugoslavia in 1978 as the International Association for the Economics of Self-Management. Its journal, Economic Analysis and Worker’s Management, existed at least from 1998 to 2000 with the following CESES participants on its international editorial board: Alberto Chilosi, Bruno Dallago, Mario Ferrero, and D. Mario Nuti. http://ocean.st.usm.edu/%7Ew300388/jep.html.

  109. Back cover of SPS. The journals have the same format and some similar participants.

  110. Just some of the many Italian books on liberal socialism are Ciuffoletti (1999), Fiori (1999), Papa (1999), Pugliese (1999), Rosselli (1994), Sbarberi (1999), and Urbinati and Canto-Sperber (2004).

  111. Hardt and Negri (2000) argue that “[t]he multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude...” (p. 62). Similarly, Lotringer (2004) writes, “Capital affords us to project ahead, work it from within, knowing all too well that it will be quick to instrumentalize any creative move, turning it into binary oppositions, however radical they claim to be, proven recipes that failed repeatedly because they have become inadequate to think the complexity of the contemporary reality” (pp. 17–18).

  112. Other Sovietological institutions had these qualities and included regular CESES participants, such as the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies where Alec Nove worked and the University of Paris-I’s Center for International Economics of the Socialist Countries directed by Marie Lavigne. There were many other institutions, such as the Korcula Summer School, the Inter-University Center in Dubrovnik, the International Economic Association, and many more.

  113. This approach is similar to that of Callon (1998), Latour (1988), Mitchell (1990, 2002), and Ross (2002) who seek to discover the heterogeneous networks that create knowledge. However, Hardt and Negri (2000) have recognized that the current paradigm of power has moved beyond binaries and essentialisms also to support hybridity, fluidity, and difference, and thus thrives on criticisms of dichotomies (p. 138).

  114. Following Turner (1967), this heterogeneous, liminal space can be seen a “realm of pure possibility” and might become a source for innovations and future structure. As Moncada and Blau (2006) argue, the “billions of poor, traditionally living on what they grow, find, or catch, possess rare knowledge of how societies function and self-govern – as cooperatives, participatory democracies, collectives.... From them westerners will, we venture, learn more than we can now imagine” (p. 121).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Nancy Hanrahan, Mark Jacobs, Gianni Salvini, and the reviewers and editors of Theory and Society for their insightful comments. I am also grateful for the support of Peter Stearns and the Office of the Provost at George Mason University. I owe special thanks to Andrew Zimmerman for many discussions that greatly improved this article. Earlier versions were presented at New York University’s “How Neoliberalism became a Transnational Movement” conference, the Marxist Literary Group conference in 2005, and George Mason University’s Sociology and Anthropology Department. This project greatly benefited from the assistance of the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and the Confindustria Historical Archives located in Rome, Italy. Many thanks to the Italian scholars who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this project.

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An organizer of CESES activities agreed that CESES was part of a liminal space, “a Galaxy without borders.” Personal correspondence with CESES organizer, April 4, 2007.

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Bockman, J. The origins of neoliberalism between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism: “A galaxy without borders”. Theor Soc 36, 343–371 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9037-x

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