City Research Online

Abstract

This paper shows that the Hewlett Foundation, contra its legal status, its non-political self-concept and conventional scholarly claims to third-sector or technocratic neutrality, acts as a liberal ‘crisis machine’ to manage and moderate radical change, and to strengthen existing power distributions. This occurs through programmes that protect the US elite constitutional processes, promote post-neoliberalism, and address China’s geo-economic challenge. This provides a powerful example of how an under-researched liberal-progressive foundation’s power works and how technocratic-liberalism organizes ruling elites (including extreme and far-right Trumpists) who shape and perpetuate the terrain of political polarization, attacks on democracy and the structural inequities of neoliberalism. The Hewlett Foundation’s ‘performative radicalism’ in managing crises is rooted in its centrality within corporate elite networks and in the mindsets and imperatives of US global hegemony. Using Gramscian concepts of hegemony, organic crisis and passive revolution, the paper presents the Hewlett Foundation as an architect-funder of elite knowledge networks spanning foundations, think tanks, academia and the state. These networks consciously organize elite consensus and disorganize or downplay mass movements’ roles in driving radical change.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	crisis machine, post-neoliberalism, US hegemony, elite knowledge networks, polycrisis, organic crisis
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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