I am interested in most things having to do with political economy, intellectual history, history of economic thought and economic- and political history. I did my PhD in History and Civilisation at the European University Institute from 2013 to 2017, with a thesis in intellectual micro-history on early neoliberalism. It won the History of Economics Society's annual dissertation prize and was published as the book Reinventing Liberalism - The Politics, Philosophy and Economics of Early Neoliberalism (1920 - 1947) by Springer in 2020. After finishing my PhD, I wrote a monograph in Norwegian on the history of market reforms in Norway, entitled Markedsvendingen - Nyliberalismens historie i Norge (Fagbokforlaget, 2020).
I am currently employed on a project related to the role of the Norwegian state as the largest owner in publicly listed companies, and I continue to publish research on topics related to neoliberalism and the history of economic thought.
In 1980s Norway, a group committed to libertarian ideology became influential within Fremskrittspartiet. This new party became known for its opposition not only to taxation and public spending, but also to non-western immigration. The libertarians within the same party, however, advocated open borders. The libertarians were ousted from the party in 1994, but libertarianism has remained a key plank in the party’s otherwise national-conservative ideology. Crossovers and alliances between cosmopolitan libertarians and nationalistic anti-immigration groups have become commonplace, and through an analysis of the Norwegian libertarian movement, I argue that these are possible due to the idea of open borders only holding a peripheral position within libertarian ideology. The issue of open borders was given some attention in debates between libertarians and populists within FrP, but was not an important ideological concept for the intellectuals behind the libertarian journal Ideer om Frihet. The article thus argues that a commitment to what we may call cosmopolitanism does exist within libertarianism and may be used to make sense of core concepts such as individualism, freedom and markets, but is nonetheless expendable for most libertarians, as they were for the Norwegian libertarians who found a home in the country’s most nativist political party.
Innset, Ola (2023)
Context and the Neoliberalism Wars
[Article in business/trade/industry journal]. Œconomia – Histoire/Epistémologie/Philosophie, 13(1), s. 101- 114. Doi: 10.4000/oeconomia.14061
Innset, Ola (2023)
Dual Argument, Double Truth: On the Continued Importance of the State in Neoliberal Thought.
It has been established that the neoliberal creed arising in the interwar and early postwar years, despite its strong rejection of economic planning, also entailed a rejection of laissez-faire liberalism. This article argues that recent attempts at construing early neoliberalism as thus being a more nuanced or moderate creed than later iterations are nonetheless flawed. The “dual argument” of early neoliberalism indicated a new approach to market liberalism in which the state was not seen as the market’s opposite but rather its precondition. This important move is obscured by the language of moderation and nuance. In place of “the radicalization thesis,” the second part of the article considers Philip Mirowski’s concept of a “double-truth doctrine” and argues that an appreciation of the state for social and economic governance is a common feature of different neoliberalisms, which nonetheless differ in their preferred policy suggestions for the use of state power.
Innset, Ola (2020)
Markedsvendingen. Nyliberalismens historie i Norge
Fagbokforlaget.
Innset, Ola (2020)
Reinventing Liberalism. The Politics, Philosophy and Economics of Early Neoliberalism (1920 - 1947)
Springer.
Heiret, Yngve Solli & Innset, Ola (2025)
Austerity without deficits: The global political economy of Norway’s fiscal paradox
This article advances a new theoretical understanding of the global political economy of austerity through an examination of austerity policies in Norway, a country with soaring fiscal surpluses. Critical scholarship has analyzed austerity as an incoherent economic idea – a product of unreasonable public accounting, or simply ideological nonsense. No national context seems to confirm such a view more than Norway, where wage growth has been curbed and welfare spending restrained in a context of unprecedented public prosperity. Yet, this article argues that there is a rational core to Norwegian ‘austerity without deficits’, if seen from the vantage point of capital in globally integrated neoliberal capitalism. Examining the development of Norwegian economic policies since the 1970s, we demonstrate how the Norwegian state has imposed austerity measures in order to bolster national capital’s global competitiveness. Disciplining labor and public budgets is, we argue, the cost of doing business in today’s world economy. We call this uneven and combined austerity: combining national economies in a global structure of interlocking dependence, neoliberal austerity imposes limits to popular demands for welfare and better material conditions of living, even in countries where public money abounds.
Innset, Ola (2024)
National Interests as Positive Externalities: Headquarters Retainment as Justification for Hybrid State-owned Enterprises in Norway (2000–2021)
As a result of the partial privatization and public listing of two large state-owned enterprises in 2001, the Norwegian state became the largest owner at the Oslo stock exchange. A new mode of corporate governance was developed, through which retainment of the corporate headquarters (HQ) of hybrid state-owned enterprises became the sole political goal of continued state ownership in these corporations. This article explores the perceived benefits to the national economy of these company HQ through an investigation of public documents and interviews with key stakeholders. The article argues that the main function of the goal of HQ retainment was to portray national interests and political goals as mere (positive) externalities of HQ location, and that this goal was formalized due to a perceived need to depoliticize the corporate governance of hybrid state-owned enterprises.
Innset, Ola (2024)
State-owned enterprises after the market turn: Hybridisation and the historical development of nested paradoxes in the case of Norway
The article studies the recent history of state owned enterprises (SOEs) in Norway through the lens of paradox theory. A tension between busi- ness goals and political goals lie at the heart of SOEs, and I analyse processes of partial privatisations in the 1990s and early 2000s as attempts to overcome this original paradox. Through the public listing of major SOEs, the Norwegian state became the largest owner on the Oslo stock exchange and a new corporate governance setup for these entities arose. I propose to see this development as a case of historically developed nested paradoxes, and argue that a new paradox emerged in which the Norwegian state attempted to reach political goals through the ownership of SOEs by not having explicit political goals. I find two main equilibrating mechanisms for this paradox, and discuss some of the ways paradoxical tensions of SOEs still persist despite attempts to overcome them
The article develops a new framework for the study of market reforms in Nordic welfare states based on a division between “markets”, “quasi-markets” and “pseudo-markets”. The two latter types of marketization have been the most common, and the article exemplifies them by revisiting the early 1990s Swedish school reform, “Friskolereformen”—which instigated a quasi-market for publicly funded schools run by both for-profit companies and non-profit actors—and the Norwegian hospital reform, “Foretaksreformen” of 2001—which created what we call a pseudo-market, in which public hospitals were reorganized to mimic the structures of capitalist enterprise. By discussing the different reforms in relation to justification, the type of welfare state sector, and the political orientation of the government implementing the reform, our study sheds new light on similarities and differences in marketization processes in the Nordics. Particularly, we find that the justification for the reforms differed, with the Swedish reform being justified in ideological terms and the Norwegian in technocratic terms. Contrary to some literature, we hold that marketization has fundamentally altered Nordic welfare states and the relationship between capital and society in the Nordics, and we suggest that our framework could be used for future comparative studies of market reforms.
Innset, Ola (2024)
Tor Bjørklund i samarbeid med Axel Fjeldavli Norske partier og velgere. Valgresultatenes historiske røtter
This article argues that the introduction of ‘metahistorical perspectives’ can greatly enrich the practice of public history. Through the example of a series of public events about important historical events held at the National Library of Norway, it is argued that an attention to microhistory, pedagogical theory and especially William Sewell Jr.’s theory of events can be beneficial when programming events for the general public. This focus on ‘metahistorical perspectives’ in the practice of public history stands in contrast to widely held notions of public history as entailing simplifications and ‘dumbing down’ of academic knowledge.
Innset, Ola (2021)
An Army of Fighters for Freedom. The social environment of the first Mont Pélerin-Society conference
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek gave a lecture at Stanford University where he referred to the organization he was planning to set up as “an army of fighters for freedom”. This article investigates the social environment of “Hayek’s army” by looking specifically at the founding conference of the Mont-Pèlerin Society, some three years later. An exploration of this famous 10-day conference in the Swiss Alps shows that the transnational group of neoliberal thinkers was characterized by social privilege, something that contributes to contextualising their rightleaning political views. Several of the American conference attendees hailed from more modest backgrounds than their European counter parts, however, and the views on display during the conference were far from uniform. This was especially the case when discussions centred on redistribution and poverty, where, to widespread criticism, Milton Friedman presented his famous proposal for a negative income tax.
Innset, Ola (2020)
Review of Janek Wasserman’s The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019, 354 pp.
Det har blitt hevdet at Høyres økonomiske politikk i etterkrigsårene stort sett bestod i å «stabbe imot» men la seg trekke med av Arbeiderpartiets økonomiske politikk. I denne artikkelen viser vi imidlertid at Høyre aktivt støttet statseid industri i flere tilfeller, og at Høyre formulerte begrunnelser for dette i tråd med sine konservative idealer. Dette beviser dermed ikke floskelen om at «alle nordmenn er sosialdemokrater», men forteller oss isteden noe om hvordan merkelapper som «konservativ» og «sosialdemokratisk» er sterkt foranderlige. I etterkrigsårene var det høyst uklart for de fleste hva en konservativ økonomisk politikk egentlig innebar, og denne artikkelen kontrasterer og sammenligner Høyres forsøk på å definere dette med den samtidige utviklingen av nyliberalisme som et transnasjonalt politisk prosjekt. De tidlige nyliberalistene ønsket en sterk stat for å legge til rette for markedsmekanismer, noe som eksemplifiserer hvordan bildet av økonomisk politikk som en pendel mellom stat og markeder er forenklende og tidvis misvisende.
Innset, Ola (2017)
Markets, Knowledge and Human Nature: Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi and Twentieth-century Debates on Modern Social Order
