While sitting before private glowing screens – seemingly private, that is – we use social media with ever greater enthusiasm. In the digital revolution that promises to set us free, we update our Facebook pages from our smartphones. But it only marks us, like Orwellian proles, enabling the Pentagon to trace us with ease. So we learned when The Guardian last month published secret documents about a US National Security Agency program, Prism, said to tap the customer data accumulated by corporations such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. Far from delivering a libertarian utopia, the internet realises Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a vast surveillance plan invisible to those observed.

Prism as Panopticon, internet as Pentagon, a Hobbesian leviathan as corporate power: what of neo-liberalism’s promise of a minimal state? “The era of big government is over,” Democratic president Bill Clinton proclaimed in 1996, in centre-left capitulation to the logic of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The market will set us free, we are told, even as a penal-military-security state, itself trending toward privatisation, expands forever. At all levels, the market is saturated with collaborations of state and capital: revolving doors, no-bid contracts, quantitative easing, drone manufacturing.

Few people understood the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation when it emerged around 1973, if David Harvey is right about its birthdate. Most of us still strive to make sense of it. In the US, only in the 1990s did “neo-liberalism” become a common phrase. Well ahead of that curve, in France, was Michel Foucault who, not coincidentally, was responsible more than any other thinker for focusing contemporary attention on the Panopticon, in his 1975 work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. He chose neoliberalism, perceptively, as the topic for his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978-79 prior to the Thatcher victory; only recently were those lectures published in English as The Birth of Biopolitics. Neoliberals, Foucault observed, celebrate the market but are not the same as classical liberals. “Neoliberalism,” he said, “should not be identified with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity and intervention”.

In Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, Philip Mirowski is equally devoted to underscoring the “neo” in neoliberalism, including its deviation from the minimal state. Dedicating this book “to neoliberals of all parties” (a play on Friedrich Hayek’s dedication of The Road to Serfdom “to socialists of all parties”), Mirowski does not see our epoch of austerity and hostility to regulation, taxes and social provision as likely to produce a withering-away of the capitalist state, with Hayek playing substitute for Marx. Rather, neoliberalism augurs the state’s recalibration and redeployment. This book is not a blow-by-blow account of the financial crisis or of politics today. It is instead a fearless correction to much of existing social thought, a fusillade of provocation that alternates between witty, almost conversational, passages and erudite digressions on epistemology and political economy.

Mirowski is perhaps best known for “The Great Mortification”, an essay published in The Hedgehog Review in the early aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08. There, he posited that economics as a discipline failed to perceive the looming bubble that produced the greatest crisis since the Great Depression because it had expelled philosophy and history from its curriculum in favour of technical modelling and market rationality dogmas. Here, he extends that theme, arguing that neoclassical economics – the whole thing, not just its lesser claims, such as the “efficient market hypothesis” – must be scrapped. This signifies that Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is an uncommonly radical text, oppositional all the way down. Mirowski is positioned not just against the Chicago School established by Milton Friedman but also those, from Paul Krugman to Joseph Stiglitz, who serve as the putative left-wing economic alternative in the constricted world of mainstream press coverage.

In this delightful bramble of a text, Mirowski’s own precise vantage point is deliberately impossible to discern. While he is decidedly left-wing, he faults the recent Occupy movement, characterising it as ineffectual because it manifested neoliberal assumptions in its anarchism-inflected refusal to craft a serious political opposition. He dismisses Marxists, Harvey among them, as crudely deterministic. It would seem that Mirowski favours a form of social democracy, cloaked in invocations of heterodox economics, but his social democracy does not take the usual squeaky-clean Scandinavian form. Jaundiced, dyspeptic, bordering on the cynical, Mirowski dots his prose with a retro 1980s, high-theoretical gloss of citations from the likes of Foucault and political scientist Wendy Brown, although with little postmodernist obscurantism. He simultaneously faults as backward-looking most of the left, including those who argue that the New Deal should be revived. He even takes on (seemingly as a “frenemy”) left-leaning Australian economist John Quiggin, author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideals Still Walk among Us, whose metaphor of the undead guides Mirowski’s own opening question: why does neoliberalism, reduced to a corpse by the recent economic catastrophe, still haunt us?

How Mirowski answers that question forms the rub of the book. Economists’ refusal to relinquish their blatantly failed assumptions, he holds, is unsurprising, provided one is familiar with the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, in which true believers, confronted by irrefutable evidence that disproves their core beliefs, merely redouble their efforts. Secondarily, he conjectures a “neoliberal thought collective” going back to Hayek, its precepts set within a Russian doll, in which neoliberalism’s insiders realise that the point is maximisation of profit, through state intervention to sustain markets if necessary. The outermost doll, created largely for simpleton fans of Ayn Rand, touts laissez-faire libertarianism, while only dupes are shocked by the enthusiasm for state action lurking within. (A case in point: Edward Snowden, who leaked information about Prism, is not only a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and the corporate defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton but was also a small-scale donor to libertarian-conservative politician Ron Paul, who named his son Rand and whose neoliberal fundamentalism is seen as radical by his followers.)

Mirowski declaims against conspiracy theories in asides that are not quite persuasive, since his Russian doll metaphor is too close to the postulation of an inner cabal. Far more profound and disconcerting is his suggestion that we are all neoliberals now, and that neoliberalism was not dislodged by the financial crisis because it lies within ourselves. We now inhabit, he argues, “entrepreneurial” selves. Compelled to position ourselves in the market and rebrand ourselves daily, we manifest neoliberalism’s innate logic. That existential critique is all the more powerful since it can so easily be turned on Mirowski, whose pejorative use of “collective” in calling out neoliberals for groupthink risks equating the social with the totalitarian, thereby validating neoliberalism while rebuking it.

If Mirowski’s epistemological method tips too often toward the philosopher’s vanity of imagining bad thinking to be the cause of all bad practice (when it is so often the reverse), he also signals a much-needed realisation that neoliberalism’s persistence has much to do with the labour movement being too weak to pose a plausible, comprehensible alternative to neoliberalism. If often barren of hope, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is extraordinarily clever, piercing and learned, establishing Mirowski as the Thorstein Veblen of our day, a creative critic with a highly perceptive, courageous pen dipped in idiosyncrasy and irony. Should neoliberalism ever be transcended, this work will be one of the resources that made it possible.