Neoliberalism as Thought Collective and Political Program
There are many ways that social theory operates in a modality different from the natural sciences; but one standout characteristic is that when it comes to the Big Notions that really matter, the social disciplines often find their acolytes proclaiming the “Death of X” contemporaneously with commensurate authorities insisting that X never really existed. In physics, for instance, analysts might want to claim that Ptolemaic astronomy or aether theory or cold fusion was “dead” for the modern profession, but never go so far as to assert that the theory or concept had historically just been a figment of the imaginations of people who should never have been taken seriously all along. By contrast, this happens all the time in social thought: social theorists often attempt the torturous straddle of denying that some widespread concept ever really existed, while pronouncing last rites over the ectoplasmic corpse. No wonder we have become ensnared in zombie nightmares, as glimpsed in the last chapter. It may be symptomatic of an endemic wobbly sense of ontology, or perhaps a deficiency in sense of decorum for the dear departed, or maybe something worse, but it nonetheless is an occupational hazard that renders debate treacherous.
The theoretical entity “neoliberalism” has suffered this straddle over the unfolding of the current crisis. A chorus of think tanks trumpeted its negligibility, while a smaller choir chanted its dirge. All manner of commentators, including, significantly, no small number of neoliberals, have insisted that the theory behind the label never really existed;1 if they happen to be preternaturally pugnacious, they tend to dismiss it as a swearword emitted by addled denizens of the left. The confusion was then confounded by an outbreak of premature rumors of the Demise of Neoliberalism, when people were suggesting that the economic crisis had finally sealed its fate. The impression back then was so vivid for some that they could practically hear the worms feasting on the carcass of the still-warm ideology. The purpose of chapter 1 was to suggest that a few subsequent years’ experience has vexed and discomfited almost everyone involved, and that political progress demands that this calamity be better understood. It may be the case that even those who feel they have a good working knowledge of political theory need to revisit the entire question of neoliberalism, if only to better focus upon the incongruity of the neoliberals coming out of the crisis stronger than when they were paving the way for its onset. It is one thing to glibly appeal to a nefarious “Shock Doctrine” (see Naomi Klein), it is another to comprehend in detail how the reckoning was evaded: something here dubbed the “Shock Block Doctrine.” Neoliberalism is alive and well; those on the receiving end need to know why.
Questions as to its existence, its efficacy, and its vulnerability to refutation lie at the heart of the concerns that motivate this chapter. Neoliberal initiatives and policies still carry the day, and more to the point, most people still understand their own straitened circumstances through the lens of what can only be regarded as neoliberal presumptions. Can it be chalked up to confusion, or sour grapes, or a gullible temperament? Was it due to the intersection of some otherwise uncorrelated historical tendencies, like the provocation of immigrant labor, the weaknesses of the governmental structures of the European Union, or heavy state dependence on the financial sector? In writing the history, many local conjunctures must be acknowledged, but none of them really get at the Intellectual Teflon: the way the crisis did not provoke any fundamental revision of prior political catechism.2 The most likely reason the doctrine that precipitated the crisis has evaded responsibility and the renunciation indefinitely postponed is that neoliberalism as worldview has sunk its roots deep into everyday life, almost to the point of passing as the “ideology of no ideology.”
Indeed, at this late hour, the world is still full of people who believe that neoliberalism doesn’t really exist. I run into them every day. Mitchell Dean nicely captures this attitude: “Neoliberalism, it might be argued, is a rather overblown notion, which has been used, usually by a certain kind of critic, to characterize everything from a particular brand of free-market political philosophy to a wide variety of innovations in public management.”3 For such skeptics, it is inconceivable to them that contemporary political economy displays any kind of structure, outside of some vague notions of supply and demand. Most people, it seems, have never even heard of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which at one time in its history was the premier site of the construction of neoliberalism. Liberalism, neoliberalism, conservatism, libertarianism . . . at least in America, they are all just a blur. People who live elsewhere in the world have little feeling for the American cultural drumbeat that keeps insisting politics has no theoretical grounding—it is only something dubbed “human nature” that can be theorized. America, that fabled Land of Neoliberalism in European parlance, soldiers on, blissfully unaware that it is neoliberal. One temptation might be to attribute this to some notorious Anglophone allergy to abstract political analysis; but that would be too hasty. Part of the blame might be laid at the door of the neoliberals themselves: as I document below, even though the members of Mont Pèlerin Society initially used the term “neoliberal” to refer to themselves in the early 1950s, by the 1960s they had backtracked, trumpeting the ambagious notion that their ideas all could be traced back to Adam Smith, if not before. But an equal moiety of blame should be dished out to their opponents on the left, who often bandy about attributions of “neoliberalism” as a portmanteau term of abuse when discussing grand phenomena often lumped together under the terminology of “globalization” and “financialization” and “governmentality.” The Washington Consensus, the death of the welfare state, the risk society, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, European (dis)integration, the ascendancy of China, and the outsourcing of manufacturing all portend cosmic themes, mostly of interest to those who regard themselves of taking the broad view of power politics.4 But broad characterizations of contemporary political events should not be mistaken for the painstaking construction of political doctrines to motivate organization in the long run, however much they may be related. Abstract dreadnoughts battling in the hyperspace of concepts, as with nationalisms clashing in the dead of night, have done little to illuminate the nature of neoliberalism for the average person, alas. And then there are those who insist it is really all about “economic theory,” which is guaranteed to make most people want to pass it by as quickly as possible.
The clarification of the neoliberal program is first and foremost a historical inquiry: much of the preliminary spadework unearthing its lineage and development has already been performed. We shall have occasion to reference this body of work over the rest of this volume.5 But rather than simply recapitulating that historical narrative here, this chapter will approach the role of neoliberalism in the crisis in a more analytical register: first by documenting the ways that it was anticipated that the crisis would purportedly change the intellectual landscape; then by summarizing commonplace misconceptions about the core doctrines of neoliberalism which serve to reinforce its longevity; following that up with the indispensable characterization of the “double truth” of neoliberalism; and ending up with one of the major reasons neoliberals have come through the crisis unscathed, as rooted in their approach to knowledge itself. Fortified with this understanding of the political background, we can then turn directly to issues of the conceptual unfolding of the crisis itself in the rest of the volume.
Don’t Look Back
There can be no joy in pointing out just how wrong people have been about the intellectual consequences of the crisis. I recall myself entertaining the notion back in 2008 that perhaps, finally, we just might dispense with some of the rubbish that had sullied a political economy orthodoxy over my lifetime. Apophenia cascades at epidemic proportions when the sky seems to be falling.
In August 2007, the Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote, “We are all neoliberals now.”6 Now, five years later, Monbiot’s claim must seem eerily prescient. Things were not always thus. In the midst of the downdraft of 2008–9, I remember people saying to me: Yes, it’s been awful, but maybe the trial by fire will cleanse as well as sear. As Jenny Turner reminisced in the London Review of Books, “People imagined that a crash, when it came, would act like Occam’s Razor, cutting out the hedge
