TCS Special Issue: ‘Post-Neoliberalism?’
Now available, Theory, Culture & Society’s Special Issue: ‘Post-Neoliberalism?’; edited by William Davies and Nicholas Gane.
Critics and theorists have been anticipating ‘post-neoliberalism’ for some years. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, there were predictions – later discredited – that there would be a major paradigm shift in the ideas and policies governing national economies and global capitalism. The ‘populist’ upheavals of the years that followed posed the question anew, as movements of both left and right challenged the dominance of unelected technocrats and global markets.
This special issue explores the question of ‘post-neoliberalism’ in the recent context, of nationalist and libertarian opposition to neoliberalism, and amidst various intellectual challenges to the neoliberal orthodoxies of Hayek and the Chicago School. Rather than anticipate a wholesale paradigm shift, of the sort that occurred in policy-making in the 1970s, it studies disparate ideas, movements and political forces which take aim at the neoliberal status quo in one way or another. As Davies and Gane’s Introduction explores, these are now joined by the disruption caused by Covid-19, which has had contradictory effects, both accelerating certain varieties of privatization (especially in the reach of platform business models), while also occasioning a revival of social government and macroeconomic intervention.
A common theme in these articles, and the key to understanding how post-neoliberal tendencies are awoken, is greater scepticism towards the market, as a legally and administratively protected and unimpeachable sphere of human freedom. In place of an ideology that treats the price system as final, we see in these papers various rival schemes and hierarchies through which liberty is imagined and defended. It is not the price system that is supreme, but some neighbouring concept: property rights, individual sovereignty, national sovereignty, the family or some ethnic identity. Core neoliberal institutions, such as central banks, are criticised for having grown too powerful and rigid, while rebellions from above and below seek to unsettle and question the established market order.
Cover image: Joy Gerrard, Protest Crowd, London (People’s Vote March, 2019) 2020. Japanese ink on paper. Also exhibited as a large digital wall print at the Golden Thread Gallery, Put it to the People, December 2020. Image courtesy of the artist. Photography, Ros Kavanagh.
In her exploration of the paleo-conservative Murray Rothbard, Melinda Cooper demonstrates one crucial right-wing counter-movement against the elitism and cosmopolitanism of financial capitalism; Quinn Slobodian’s analysis of trade policy under President Trump shows how commitment to global competition has been challenged as much by elites on the right, as by popular forces; Dorit Geva’s case study of Hungarian ‘ordo-nationalism’ shows how a neoliberal ethic of independence can be wedded to ethnic and gender hierarchies; William Davies considers how neoliberalism has acquired a more nationalistic, sovereigntist quality in the wake of the financial crisis; Nicholas Gane studies the roots of policy ‘nudges’, unearthing tensions in the neoliberal vision of market freedom; Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows examine the ‘exit’ fantasies of radical neo-reactionary libertarians, seeking to escape politics altogether; Alan Finlayson’s exploration of online Alt-Right communities emphasises the reaction against a perceived progressive elite, that has allegedly dominated global politics in its own interests.
By collecting these articles together, ‘Post-Neoliberalism?’ reflects on the disruption and discrediting of the market ideal, and considers what alternative visions of liberty and sovereignty might take its place.
Abstracts and article links appear below
William Davies and Nicholas Gane, Post-Neoliberalism? An Introduction (Open Access)
This article provides an introduction to the special issue on post-neoliberalism. It does so by considering challenges to the neoliberal order that have come, post-financial crisis, from the political right. It looks closely at the relation of neoliberalism to conservatism, on one hand, and libertarianism, on the other, in order to address the threat posed to the neoliberal order by paleoconservatism, neoreactionary politics, ordonationalism, libertarian paternalism, and different forms of sovereignty and elite power. The final section of this introduction reflects on the challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy posed by the current COVID-19 crisis. For while events of 2020–21 have facilitated new forms of privatization of many public services and goods, they also signal, potentially, a break from the neoliberal orthodoxies of the previous four decades, and, in particular, from their overriding concern for the market.
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Melinda Cooper, The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation
There is by now broad consensus in the critical literature that neoliberalism and social conservatism have frequently coexisted in practice. Yet the alt-right fits none of the previously identified alliances: this is not the neoliberal neoconservatism of the Reagan and Bush years, nor the neoliberal communitarianism of the Third Way, nor even a form of neoliberal authoritarianism. Instead, the alt-right claims intellectual descent from economic libertarianism, on the one hand, and paleo- (as opposed to neo-) conservatism on the other. This paper traces the contours of this ‘paleolibertarian’ alliance, first by following the volatile political trajectory of Murray Rothbard, the foremost philosopher of American libertarianism, and, second, by uncovering precedents in the longer history of the American far right. It will be argued that paleoconservatism makes for a uniquely powerful ally because it offers a workable response to libertarianism’s intrinsic contradictions.
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Quinn Slobodian, The Backlash Against Neoliberal Globalization from Above: Elite Origins of the Crisis of the New Constitutionalism
This article recounts the backlash against the neoliberal constitutionalism that locked in free trade and capital rights through the multilateral treaty organizations of the 1990s. It argues that we can find important forces in the disruption of the status quo among the elite losers of the 1990s settlement. Undercut by competition from China, the US steel industry, in particular, became a vocal opponent of unconditional free trade and a red thread linking all of Trump’s primary advisers on matters of trade. Steel lobbyists themselves helped frame a critique of actually existing neoliberal globalism, which Trump both adopted and acted on as part of his trade war. By searching for the contemporary attack on neoliberal constitutionalism among the disgruntled corporate elite, we find that our current crisis must be framed as a backlash from above as well as one from below.
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Dorit Geva, Orbán's Ordonationalism as Post-Neoliberal Hegemony (Open Access)
This essay examines Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and his cultivation of a new form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism, which I call ordonationalist. With particular emphasis placed on tracing resurgence of the national state, ordonationalism points to the neoliberal intensifications, but also the ruptures to neoliberalism through post-neoliberal advances, exemplified by the Hungarian state. Ordonationalism combines: (1) a newly empowered nationalist state invested in flexibilizing domestic labour and controlling access to domestic capitalist accumulation; (2) a national state captured by political actors as a means towards controlling access to domestic capital accumulation; (3) a novel regime of social reproduction, linking financialization, flexibilization of labour, steep decline in supporting social reproduction, and supporting consumption as a source of social reproduction. This project is hegemonic. However, the contradictions between radical neoliberalization and radical nationalism generate ever-more instances where an authoritarian state steps in to solve crises generated by its contradictions.
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William Davies, The Revenge of Sovereignty on Government? The Release of Neoliberal Politics from Economics Post-2008
Liberal government, as analysed by Foucault, is a project of measured, utilitarian political activity, that takes ‘population’ as its object, dating back to the late 17th century. The rise of nationalism, authoritarianism and populism directly challenges this project, by seeking to re-introduce excessive, gratuitous and performative modes of power back into liberal societies. This article examines the relationship and tensions between government and sovereignty, so as to make sense of this apparent ‘revenge of sovereignty on government’. It argues that neoliberalism has been a crucial factor in the return of sovereignty as a ‘problem’ of contemporary societies. Neoliberalism tacitly generates new centres of sovereign power, which have become publicly visible since 2008, leading to a dramatic resurgence of discourses and claims to ‘sovereignty’.
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Nicholas Gane, Nudge Economics as Libertarian Paternalism (Open Access)
Given the growing prominence of nudge economics both within and beyond the academy, it is a timely moment to reassess the philosophical and political arguments that sit at its core, and in particular what Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call libertarian paternalism. The first half of this paper provides a detailed account of the main features of this form of paternalism, before moving, in the second half, to a critical evaluation of the nudge agenda that questions, among other things, the gendered basis of paternalistic governance; the idea of ‘nudging for good’; and the political values that underpin nudge. The final section of this paper builds on the existing work of John McMahon by asking whether libertarian paternalism should be understood as a new, hybrid form of neoliberalism, or, rather, as a post-neoliberal form of governance that has emerged out of, and flourished in, the post-crisis situation.
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Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows, Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit (Open Access)
This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in ‘The Sovereign Individual’.
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Alan Finlayson, Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web (Open Access)
Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric, this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context, the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ understood to dominate through discursive, cultural power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas, these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ – critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves.
