Abstract

This chapter examines the works of Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) and Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992) to understand how they interpreted the decline of the liberal order and formulated its renewal. Situating their contributions within the crises that twentieth-century liberalism, it explores how both thinkers conceived neoliberalism as a remedy to civilizational decline. Through a comparative reading of their major works, the chapter shows how each author mobilized evolutionary concepts to articulate a project of "reconstruction" or "restatement" of liberalism. The result is a biopolitical rationality that seeks to establish neoliberalism as the driving force behind the supposed evolutionary "progress" of civilization. Distinguishing this framework from classical social Darwinism, the chapter introduces the notion of neo-social Darwinism to describe how neoliberal rationality reconfigures evolutionary theory into a moral and political doctrine that equates the advancement of human civilization with the ascendancy of neoliberalism itself. In this framework, Lippmann’s "adaptation" and Hayek’s "survival of the successful" become biopolitical imperatives for the humankind.