the interplay of contemporary orthodox economists with the other levels of cultural response and elite generalist knowledge, even though no one tradition could be reduced to any other. Neoclassical economics was not intrinsically neoliberal over its entire one-and-a-half-century history; but it sure looks like they are working in tandem now. That is why this volume, in chapters 4 and 5, devotes a fair proportion of attention to what economists have said and done after 2007.
When considering the relationship of formal economic knowledge to social movements, it has become commonplace for pundits to quote the dictum of John Maynard Keynes in the General Theory: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”18 However stylish was Keynes’s prose, the rudimentary sociology of knowledge propounded therein has turned out badly flawed. Far from ectoplasmic missives from the late lamented, a simulacrum of a genteel Edwardian séance, the injection of economic ideas into quotidian politics has been conducted in ways both more concrete and yet more convoluted than is suggested by this rather tendentious bit of economists’ self-flattery.
Economic doctrines rise to dominance because they have been built up from compelling intellectual trends located elsewhere in the culture, and often, in other sciences; and, in turn, depend upon promoters and funders to impress their importance upon other economists, and thenceforward the larger world. Ideas may be retailed, but they are not simply marketed, whatever the neoliberals insist otherwise. As with history, men make ideas, but not as straightforwardly as they please. Ideas have a nasty habit of transubstantiating as they wend their way throughout the space of discourse; sometimes proponents do greater harm to their integrity than do their opponents. Other times, people seem congenitally incapable of grasping what has been proffered them; and creative misunderstanding drives thought in well-worn grooves. In a riot of Dubious Signifiers, the Big Lie is king; but that does not preclude the fact that the juddering call and response strewn around it can be regularly bent to political ends. Furthermore, whenever basic notions are treated as colorless and transparent, the more they can serve as political ramparts to channel history in only one direction. When doctrines persist against all odds, say, in a worldwide economic crisis; when knowledge and power converge in stasis, then surely there is something that demands explication.
Do Zombies Dream of Eternal Rest?
In the throes of the red-misted nightmare, it looks as if the crisis, otherwise so virulent and corrosive, didn’t manage to kill even one spurious economic notion. This is not exactly news. John Quiggin has entertainingly dubbed the phenomenon Zombie Economics, and deserves kudos for stressing this point. Incongruously, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom has returned to best-seller lists after a long hiatus. Even Ayn Rand has apparently enjoyed a new lease on (undead) life. One can readily agree with Colin Crouch: “What remains of Neoliberalism after the financial crisis? The answer must be ‘virtually everything.’”19 Similarly, a glut of crisis books has been pouring from every possible digital delivery system of publishers. They fall from the presses, not stillborn, but clone-dead. The cynic might say: Leave it to academics to turn a pervasive human disaster into another unsustainable growth industry. What could be the purpose of yet another jokey variation on the metaphor of the “Invisible Hand” on the cover of some text that purports to convince us that a very few select events or principles (usually a prime number) constitute the Rosetta Stone for decoding recent events? The distance from self-help books (Six Things Momma Taught Me to Succeed When Good People Do Bad Things) to crisis prescription books (Dunk That Invisible Hand in Talcum Powder and Snap on the Handcuffs) and get-rich-quick books (Who’s Afraid of the Big Black Swan?) narrows precipitously in the modern marketplace of ideas.
Rest assured this will not be another of those books “about the crisis,” in the sense of purveying yet one more play-by-play account of who did what to whom. Indeed, some of the best-detailed accounts of the economic history of the contraction of 2007–9 are freely available online; the problem seems to be, rather, that no one cares enough anymore to expend the effort to read them.20 There is even a superb film that lays out the basic sequence of breakdown in an admirably clear way for a general audience: I refer to the movie Inside Job (2011). It even comes with an equally insightful follow-up book (Charles Ferguson’s Predator Nation). In an ideal world, as a service to tyros, there would be a YouTube link to it right here in the text. Of course, the film is weak on intercalated structural causes, elides nonfinancial considerations, and tends to fall down on international developments; and it has that bad American habit of needing to finger the stick-figure “bad guys.” Of course, such son et lumière pageants are no replacement for detailed indispensable sources of financial defalcations, quantifornication, legal sabotage, and twisted crisis particulars. But there is something else: while the film stands as an unprecedented indictment of the economics profession, it rather incongruously gives ideas a wide berth. It is skeptical of economists, but discordantly, takes no position on economics. This book therefore seeks to supplement it along a crucial dimension: it explores the economic crisis as a social disaster, but simultaneously a tumult of intellectual disarray. If the references hadn’t been so egregiously obscure, I toyed with the prospect of calling the book The Goad to Neoliberal Serfdom. Avoiding that gaffe, it may nevertheless transpire that we can recognize our predicament as a conceptual debacle, and perhaps then, in retrospect, the crisis will not go down in history as such a pathetic waste.
Beyond that, I will endeavor to make use of the crisis as a pretext and a probe into the ways in which neoliberal ideas have come to thwart and paralyze their opponents on the left. The ongoing crisis is a political watershed; keeping that conviction front and center turns out to be much more difficult than one might initially think. And by “the left,” I do not mean those benighted few, those Revenants of the Economic Rapture, who were certain that only complete and utter breakdown of capitalism would pave the way for a transition to the political ascendancy of the proletariat. History has already been unkind to them. I aspire to a different, more general audience. The Great Contraction has completely wrong-footed people who used to be called “socialists” or “progressives,” confounding every expectation that they had finally achieved some small measure of vindication for their understanding of the economy. It ushered in a mongrel regime leaving them baffled and bewildered, such that one frequently heard them wonder out loud whether there was any left left.21 It is those people who have taken it as a fundamental premise that current market structures can and should be subordinate to political projects for collective human improvement whom I seek to address here. Such like-minded compatriots are legion, but I fear their understanding of markets and societies has fallen into dire intellectual desuetude.
Let me draw one example from the film I have just praised, Inside Job. There and elsewhere in the aftermath of the crisis, one heard that the neoliberals were primarily responsible for the disaster because they imprudently deregulated markets, or else because they undermined existing regulation. I witnessed this proposition rolled out repeatedly at INET, for instance, and from people in Washington. Without a doubt, there had been important alterations in regulatory structures since 1980, and I will point to some of them in this book; but in no sense were they a simple removal of strictures that could or should be reinstated in any sense. To accept the language of “deregulation” is to become ensnared in a web of concepts that serves to paralyze political action. The neoliberals have openly expressed contempt for their opponents’ easy appeals to “reregulation”; and I think the time has come to take them far more seriously.22
The nostrum of “regulation” drags with it a raft of unexamined impediments concerning the nature of markets, a dichotomy between markets and governmentality, and a muddle over intentionality, voluntarism, and spontaneity that promulgates the neoliberal creed at a subconscious level. This, I believe, has been one major symptom of the endemic failure of economic imagination on the left. Phalanxes of political theoreticians before me have repeatedly insisted that the neoliberal project primarily reregulates and institutes an alternative set of infrastructural
