How did utopian desire come to justify political violence? And could the imagination of a better world be salvaged from totalitarian tendencies? These were prominent concerns of early neoliberal thinkers amidst the ideological turmoil of the interwar period. Intellectuals such as Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, and Ludwig von Mises were aware that the renewal of the liberal creed they proposed had to include a positive vision of the future—a counterutopia that could match the appeal of the socialist and fascist ideals they sought to combat. Current scholarship, understanding neoliberalism as an intellectual movement that called for the transformation of state and society to benefit the working of free markets, has so far neglected these cultural questions. This dissertation returns to the roots of the neoliberal movement from the 1930s to the 1960s. It examines what role utopian culture played for its earliest proponents, how neoliberals used popular culture to make their ideas accessible to wider audiences, and ultimately, how the ideas of European neoliberals transformed when they arrived in the United States during the Second World War.
To go beyond canonical neoliberal theory, this thesis presents three popular writers as case studies of neoliberal literary populism in the United States: Henry Hazlitt, Ayn Rand, and Robert A. Heinlein. These authors worked with speculative fiction to promote a utopia of the markets, embedded into the longer iconography of Americana and influenced by their direct or indirect contact with the neoliberal thought collective. Their fiction fostered an originalist reading of neoliberal economics that would come to shape the nascent libertarian movement in the US. Following their intellectual biographies, this thesis broadens the understanding of a neoliberal movement to include minor intellectuals and popularizers. It further suggests a starting point for a genuinely historical understanding of what constitutes neoliberal culture.