Review: Luca Mavelli, ‘Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives’
Review of Luca Mavelli’s Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives (Oxford University Press, 2022) 304 pages
Abstract
In Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives Luca Mavelli examines the regimes of differential inclusion that have underpinned the neoliberal governance of citizenship since at least 2008. Bringing critical border and citizenship studies into dialogue with contemporary theoretical debates on biopolitics, he illustrates how religious and moral undercurrents of politics are entangled with the neoliberal calculative governance of human lives. Mavelli’s argument develops through analyses of events in the Eurozone crisis, the ‘refugee crisis’, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside revisiting works by Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Friedrich Hayek. In the following, I explore Mavelli’s approach to neoliberal citizenship and discuss the book’s focus on European political structures and borders; the distinction between economic and emotional ‘value’; and the question of political agency over citizenship.
Reviewed by Dimitra Kotouza
Contemporary studies of citizenship under neoliberalism have been long concerned with the marginalisation of those cast as socially and economically superfluous. Citizenship in the Global North now means dismantled welfare systems, healthcare and social protections for the many, and citizenship-by-investment schemes for the super-rich. Market value and human capital are becoming the overriding criteria for political inclusion (Somers, 2008; Brown, 2015). After the Global Financial Crisis, states employed a ruthless neoliberal toolkit of austerity. As austerity measures led to unnecessary deaths, they attempted to neutralise discontent with brutal immigration regimes and intensified police violence against racialised citizens and political dissenters (Bhambra et al., 2020; Kotouza, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed these dynamics, with cost-benefit algorithms determining mortality rates among different social groups. As far-right parties continue to gain strength in Europe, governments curtail migrants’ rights, in the UK going as far as seeking to expel asylum seekers to Rwanda and deny them protection from modern slavery. For political theorists, these developments have raised crucial questions on how states’ biopolitical imperative ‘to make live and to let die’ (Foucault, 2003: 241) is being reshaped.
Luca Mavelli’s Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives offers a thought-provoking intervention in precisely this context, highlighting a religious connection between neoliberal citizenship and biopolitics: the sacralisation of markets. Mavelli argues that neoliberal governance elevates the market to a sacred status, as benevolent and beyond question—much like a god to whom human lives can be sacrificed. It reduces the political community to the market, and equates citizenship with economic participation. It scapegoats those who threaten the market and renders them disposable. Mavelli presents this argument through an iterative analysis, revisiting works by neoliberal thinkers Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Friedrich Hayek, and examining specific cases of neoliberal governance, mostly in Europe, since the Global Financial Crisis.
At first glance, Mavelli seems to reiterate long-standing critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism. The concept of ‘market fundamentalism’ has been a staple criticism of neoliberalism since the 1970s, and the association between capitalism and religion—such as the ‘worship of money’—has been a concern for most monotheistic religions. Anthropologist Mary Douglas described money as a specialised ritual, and Marx famously noted that under capitalism, the real community is the community of money. However, these ideas have not been systematically linked to the biopolitical governance of populations and citizenship in what might be termed the neoliberal era. The novelty of Mavelli’s work lies in its synthesis of these concepts, opening new avenues in critical thought. The book’s most provocative claim is that the sacralisation of the market extends beyond merely worshiping economic value; market logics have infiltrated morality, ethics and humanitarianism.
How does Mavelli conceptualise ‘citizenship’ to begin with? The title, Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives, suggests a direct engagement with Giorgio Agamben's work. For Agamben, citizenship transcends mere participation in a political community or the enjoyment of rights and protections granted by a sovereign authority. In Homo Sacer and State of Exception, Agamben (1998; 2005) builds on Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology to argue that citizenship—and sovereignty itself—is constitutively defined by the potential for a sovereign exception, a capacity to violently suspend laws and rights. The exception reduces citizens to ‘bare life’, mere biological existence, embodied in the figure of homo sacer, the ‘sacred man’ in Roman law. Simultaneously excluded from the community and already consecrated to the gods, homo sacer can be killed with impunity, but cannot be sacrificed. This analysis has profoundly influenced discussions about dehumanisation in contexts where citizenship rights are suspended or absent, such as in prisons, migrant camps, extra-judicial killings, and lethal policing. Mavelli (2022: 7) himself takes this first cue from Agamben to explore citizenship within a biopolitical and politico-religious structure of sovereignty, where the biopolitical ‘letting die’ of the ‘less valuable’ is not merely an unfortunate side-effect but an integral component of neoliberal citizenship.
Going beyond Agamben, Mavelli then asks by which logic of differentiation it becomes permissible to kill or let particular populations die. Here, another set of questions opens. For Mavelli (2022: 14), this logic involves a ‘whole range of valuations, modulations, and rankings which translate in complex systems of differential inclusion’. ‘Differential inclusion’ is a concept drawn from topological approaches to citizenship in critical border studies, according to which contemporary borders and inclusion/exclusion fault lines are fractured across society, manifesting in multiple, shifting criteria, scales, and ratings for inclusion (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). In the context of migration, these shifting parameters and modes of valuation relate to the control of labour and human capital. They create zones of hyperexploitation and influence whether one is allowed into political spaces, deported, granted asylum, offered citizenship, allowed to cross a border, or even survives the crossing.
Yet Mavelli is not satisfied that rationalities of differential inclusion in citizenship can either be reduced to the exploitability of labour or to rationalities of human capital. He builds on a second idea from Agamben’s (2007) work: his interpretation, in Profanations, of Walter Benjamin's (2004) view of capitalism as an inherently religious phenomenon. Agamben suggests that capitalism extends a tendency already present in Christianity, generalising the religious structure of separation between the sacred and the profane—between exchange value and use value—across all aspects of life, leading to the total commodification of social life. Mavelli then develops these ideas—capitalism as religion and the citizen as homo sacer—linking them to contemporary neoliberal governance: market and profit principles function as a religion that authorises the sacrifice of devalued lives for the greater economic and moral wellbeing of the national-political community. Calling attention to the religious dimension of both formative neoliberal thought and governance practices, Mavelli (2022: 8) theorises how neoliberalism sustains itself through the interlinked dimensions of ‘biopolitics, scarcity, and the sacred’.
Central to these three dimensions is the ‘sacralisation of the market’ in neoliberalism, which Mavelli illustrates by tracing Friedrich Hayek’s evolution from a secular understanding of market complexity to a form of market-based faith. Here we discover Hayek’s fascination with scholastic ideas of market prices as manifestations of divine intellect, alongside his concept of a market-driven ‘calculus of life’ assessing the value of different human lives under conditions of scarcity. For Hayek, Mavelli observes, the omnipotent and benevolent market adopts the place of God. When the market produces crises, and market ‘failures’ are managed by imposing scarcity on citizens deemed of ‘low value’, ‘these are framed as part of an inscrutable plan which will eventually deliver prosperity and growth’ (Mavelli, 2022: 123).
He exposes the same dynamics in Friedman's advocacy for criminalising Mexican immigration to the USA in Capitalism and Freedom; Gary Becker's proposals for markets in organs, immigration rights, and citizenship; and the 2014 EU abandonment of the search and rescue operations of Mare Nostrum in the Mediterranean. All of these policies, Mavelli observes, are justified by appeal to the market’s transcendent benevolence. The political proponents of stopping Mare Nostrum, for instance, presented the policy as a market-interventionist act of care, claiming it would deter migrants from making dangerous journeys and improve their chances of survival by increasing the journey's cost. Simultaneously, the policy was depicted as a means to protect European citizens from migrants, who were portrayed as exacerbating the scarcity caused by austerity measures. Mavelli describes this as a ‘biopolitics of care’, where, against Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, migrant-consumers and underpaid citizens ‘can be sacrificed and their sacrifice can contribute to increase the value of different markets. … Their life is not governed by principles of universal rights … but by an economic metric of supply and demand that is crucially mediated by the principle of scarcity.’ (171) Mavelli’s concept of ‘sacrifice’ here draws not on Agamben but on Rene Girard’s (1986) philosophical anthropology on sacrifice as founded upon scapegoating: the sacrifice enables the community to re-establish social order and space for the sacred—in this case, the market.
Economists have conducted precisely this kind of sacrificial cost-benefit analyses, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, how does this explain why those deemed less valuable are not only underpaid and hyper-exploited but are also disproportionately Black and Brown? Mavelli's theoretical framework adopts a Foucauldian conception of ‘biopolitical racism’, which it ties to the sacrificial ‘biopolitics of care’. For Foucault (2003), biopolitical racism splits the biological domain between who must live and who must die for the purpose of enhancing the life and health of the nation. This wide-ranging understanding of racism is applicable, for Foucault, to phenomena from violence against a ‘class enemy’ in socialist revolutions to the colonial racialisation of natives and enslaved people (ibid.: 262). In an analysis like Mavelli’s, however, which emphasises the commodification and marketisation of all aspects of social life, it seems especially important to distinguish relevant economic ontologies and epistemologies of racialisation emerging from the contexts of colonialism and chattel slavery, which remain relevant today. While Mavelli (2022: 171) discusses the valuation of humans like commodities, he makes no references to historical or modern forms of slavery, which feels like an important omission. Without drawing such lines of connection and distinction, it becomes difficult to acknowledge the historical exclusions within civil society, where the enslaved racialised subject emerges as the ‘unthought’ in Western ideas of emancipatory strategy and critical theory (Wilderson III, 2003: 226). In Mavelli’s book, this ‘unthought’ can be discerned in missed opportunities to draw connections between the differential policing of immigration and systematic police violence against racialised citizens.
Mavelli's analysis is most provocative and challenging when exploring the intersections and divergences between economic and non-economic aspects of neoliberal citizenship. He argues that the sacralised market operates through its ‘structural dimension’, which organises both economic and non-economic forms of value. The calculus of valuation, he writes, is ‘not confined to the pure monetary domain, but invests social relations, affects, dispositions, and spheres of existence—like humanitarianism—by rewriting them in neoliberal terms’ (Mavelli, 2022: 13). A core example is the initiative by several European states to provide refugee status to selected vulnerable Syrian refugees—children, women, the elderly, and the disabled—prompted by the widely circulated image of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a beach. Rather than representing a humanistic departure from the rationalist logic of economisation, Mavelli interprets this moral response as adhering to a parallel market logic that ranks migrants for their ‘emotional value’—the degree to which they enhance the host population's sense of moral superiority.
This is an incisive example of how the ‘biopolitics of care’ is also a racialising biopolitics, by dividing others between valuable victims and resilient invaders, denying them the agency to rescue themselves by emigrating to Europe. However, is this phenomenon unique to how neoliberal rationalities infiltrate humanitarianism as Mavelli argues? The ‘emotional value’ of European saviourism has deep colonial roots that still inflect humanitarianism (Pallister-Willkins, 2023), and has long been a marketing device for philanthropy—a business that often takes neo-colonial economic forms. Its fantasy of rescue simultaneously erases and perpetuates colonial racialisation, delegitimising resistance to it. I then wonder if the ‘emotional value’ Mavelli identifies is not a novel neoliberal form of ranking and sorting individuals for political inclusion, but a versatile colonial discourse that has long legitimised racial-capitalist business-as-usual.
Evidently, the structures of differential inclusion and logics of valuation described in this book greatly exceed conceptions of neoliberal citizenship in Europe. What is then the meaning of neoliberal citizenship outside Europe (and the Global North)? This outside, including Europe’s colonies, was what the European Union defined itself against, while portraying itself as a cosmopolitan geopolitical formation that moved toward overcoming borders within it (Hansen and Jonsson, 2011). It was simultaneously a project driven by the economic aims of market liberalisation within the European Community (Bonefeld, 2002) and neo-colonial free trade agreements with African nations in exchange for aid (Hansen and Jonsson, 2011). Neoliberal economic policies continue to worsen poverty and informalisation in the Global South, from the well-known impact of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1990s to Special Economic Zones. Europe is today externalising its border-zones to countries like Turkey and Rwanda, while denying responsibility for its genocidal colonial legacy that is perpetuated in Gaza. All these observations suggest that there are global racialised hierarchies of citizenship, enacted beyond Europe’s formal borders, and reinforced through marketised agreements that bring together neo-colonial relationships and neoliberal governance logics across the world. Understanding the ‘calculus of life’ in neoliberalism then may require an additional analytical dimension, that of historical territorial expansion, and of the racialisation of command and extraction beyond Europe’s territory.
While Mbembe’s (2003) concept of ‘necropolitics’ might more fully encompass the scale of death, dehumanisation and devastation that constitutes imperial power in these colonial contexts, we may need to go further beyond the theoretical toolkit of biopolitics. We may need to explore the emergence and contemporary functioning of a racial order, to understand how slavery, racialisation, empire, capitalism, and religion coalesced to create exclusionary logics of human worth (e.g., Hartman, 1997; Robinson, 2000). Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) contribution, for example, would take us a step back from the Foucauldian conception of biopolitics and the generic human life or population that becomes its object. Wynter elucidates how epistemologies of humanness and humanism have been founded historically on the invention of race as their nonhuman outside.
Coming back to the question of ‘value’, there is more work to be done in distinguishing between ‘neoliberal’ and broader capitalist and even pre-capitalist rationalities of human valuation and political inclusion/exclusion. Such a project would be assisted by a deeper engagement, as well, with Marxist debate on the history of capitalism, including discussions on the relationship between slavery and waged labour, and on how capitalism’s longue durée produces economically peripheral ‘surplus populations’, mostly residing in global slums (Davis, 2006; Benanav, 2010). Such an engagement with Marxism might also help us step away from Mavelli’s (2022) admittedly ‘bleak’ (205) theorisation of neoliberal citizenship, to reframe citizenship as a historical political form achieved through social struggle. Starting from authors Mavelli cites already, we can consider Mezzadra, Neilson and others’ conceptions of migrant agency, so that the very same zones of hyperexploitation, inclusive exclusion, abandonment and death can also enable possibilities for solidarity and refusal. Mavelli cites Balibar, but not his work in Equaliberty (2014), which illuminates how different movements questioned citizenship’s ‘antinomies’ and exclusions (of class, race, gender), reshaping citizenship through a dialectic of insurrection and constitution. These movements and struggles not only have a long tradition, but continue today, particularly through anti-racist, abolitionist and labour movements. Expanding our perspective globally, we find a multiplicity of intersectional action that dares to risk death in the face of necropolitical regimes (Mbembe, 2003). The schema of biopolitics-scarcity-sacred may then be less totalising—though no less real and deadly—than certain parts of the book can make it appear. To quote Walter Benjamin’s (2004: 288) note, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, from which Mavelli draws inspiration, capitalism is a ‘pure cult’, rooted in practice rather than doctrine or theology. Behind the semblance of commodity fetishism are social practices and relations, which we can, sacrilegiously, change.
References
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Dimitra Kotouza is a social researcher and author of Surplus Citizens: Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis (2019, Pluto Press). She has researched and published on topics such as radical social movements, citizenship, and the role of contemporary bio- neuro- and psy- sciences in neoliberal social governance.
Email: d.kotouza@ed.ac.uk
