In recent years, scholarly concern for ‘great transformations’ has yielded to a stress on ‘gradual transitions'. In thiscontribution, I offer a discursive institutionalist model of the shifts in ideational power which drive order construction, consolidation and crisis. First, I argue that leaders exercise rhetorical power through ideas, employing communicative appeals to shape principled beliefs. Second, I argue that élites employ epistemic power over ideas to consolidate intellectual consensus. Finally, I posit that as structural power in ideas assumes a life of its own, this breeds overconfidence and crisis. Empirically, I then track the development of the neoliberal order over Reagan's and Thatcher's use of power through ideas in constructing principled restraints on the market power of labour, Clinton- and Blair-era efforts to concentrate power over ideas in central banks, and the structural power of New Keynesian ideas that obscured concentrations of financial power, culminating in the global financial crisis.