It’s not hard to see a parallel between the neoliberal ordering of the world – where an impartial and dispassionate market directs the action independent of human biases – and Hayek’s commitment to a connectionist model of the brain. As later commentators have noted, in Hayek’s model of the mind, ‘knowledge is dispersed and distributed in the cerebral cortex much as it is in the marketplace among individuals’.3 Hayek’s argument for connectionism is an individualist, neoliberal one, and corresponds directly with his famous assertion in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that all forms of collectivism
...more