identifies the concept of “human capital” as the signal neoliberal departure—initially identified with the MPS member Gary Becker—that undermines centuries of political thought that parlayed humanism into stories of natural rights. Not only does neoliberalism deconstruct any special status for human labor, but it lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of “investments,” skill sets, temporary alliances (family, sex, race), and fungible body parts. “Government of the self” becomes the taproot of all social order, even though the identity of the self evanesces under the pressure of continual prosthetic tinkering; this is one possible way to understand the concept of “biopower.” Under this regime, the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. The manager of You becomes the new ghost in the machine.90
Needless to say, the rise of the Internet has proven a boon for neoliberals; and not just for a certain Randroid element in Silicon Valley that may have become besotted with the doctrine. Chat rooms, online gaming, virtual social networks, and electronic financialization of household budgets have encouraged even the most intellectually challenged to experiment with the new neoliberal personhood. A world where you can virtually switch gender, imagine you can upload your essence separate from your somatic self, assume any set of attributes, and reduce your social life to an arbitrary collection of statistics on a social networking site is a neoliberal playground. The saga of dot.com billionaires, so doted over by the mass media, drives home the lesson that you don’t actually have to produce anything tangible to participate in the global marketplace of the mind. This is the topic of chapter 3.
The Incredible Disappearing Agent has had all sorts of implications for neoliberal political theory. First off, the timeworn conventional complaint that economics is too pigheadedly methodologically individualist does not begin to scratch the neoliberal program. “Individuals” are merely evanescent projects from a neoliberal perspective. Neoliberalism has consequently become a scale-free Theory of Everything: something as small as a gene or as large as a nation-state is equally engaged in entrepreneurial strategic pursuit of advantage, since the “individual” is no longer a privileged ontological platform. Second, there are no more “classes” in the sense of an older political economy, since every individual is both employer and worker simultaneously; in the limit, every man should be his own business firm or corporation; this has proven a powerful tool for disarming whole swathes of older left discourse. It also appropriates an obscure historical development in American legal history—that the corporation is tantamount to personhood—and blows it up to an ontological principle. Conversely, it denies personhood to government: “Government has no economic responsibility. Only people have responsibility, and government is not a person.”91 Third, since property is no longer rooted in labor, as in the Lockean tradition, consequently property rights can be readily reengineered and changed to achieve specific political objectives; one observes this in the area of “intellectual property,” or in a development germane to the crisis, ownership of the algorithms that define and trade obscure complex derivatives, and better, to reduce the formal infrastructure of the marketplace itself to a commodity. Indeed, the recent transformation of stock exchanges into profit-seeking IPOs was a critical neoliberal innovation leading up to the crisis. Classical liberals treated “property” as a sacrosanct bulwark against the state; neoliberals do not. Fourth, it destroys the whole tradition of theories of “interests” as possessing empirical grounding in political thought.92
Clearly, we’re not in classical liberalism anymore.
[7] Neoliberals extol “freedom” as trumping all other virtues; but the definition of freedom is recoded and heavily edited within their framework. Most neoliberals insist they value “freedom” above all else; but more hairs are split in the definition of freedom than over any other neoliberal concept. This is probably a necessary consequence of the development of other neoliberal tenets, like that covered in thesis 6. It is a little hard to conceptualize freedom for an entity that displays no quiddity or persistence; and most neoliberal discussions of freedom have been cut loose from older notions of individualism.
Some members of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, like Milton Friedman, have refused to define it altogether (other than to divorce it from democracy), while others like Friedrich Hayek forge links to thesis 2 by motivating it as an epistemic virtue: “the chief aim of freedom is to provide both the opportunity and the inducement to insure the maximum use of knowledge that an individual can accrue.” As this curious definition illustrates, for neoliberals, what you think a market really is seems to determine your view of what liberty means. Almost immediately, the devil is secreted in the details, since Hayek feels he must distinguish “personal liberty” from subjective freedom, since personal liberty does not entail political liberty. Late in life, Milton Friedman posited three species of freedom—economic, social and political—but it appears that economic freedom was the only one that mattered. Some modern figures such as Amartya Sen attempt to factor in your given range of choices in an index of your freedom, but neoliberals will have none of that. They seek to paint all “coercion” as evil, but without admitting into consideration any backstory of the determinants of your intentions. Everyone is treated as expressing untethered context-free hankering, as if they were born yesterday into solitary confinement; this is the hidden heritage of entrepreneurialism of the self. This commandment cashes out as: no market can ever be coercive.93
In practice, neoliberals can’t let others contemplate too long that their peculiar brand of freedom is not the realization of any political, human, or cultural telos, but rather the positing of autonomous self-governed entities, all coming naturally equipped with some version of “rationality” and motives of ineffable self-interest, striving to improve their lot in life by engaging in market exchange.94 It follows from the human-capital concept that education is a consumer good, not a life-transforming experience. Followers of Foucault are often strongest on the elaborate revision required in cultural concepts of human freedom and morality, although this may be attributed to Foucault’s own sympathies for elements of the neoliberal project.95 Curiously enough, the fact that this version of “freedom” may escape all vernacular referent was noted when an argument broke out within the MPS in the 1970s, with Irving Kristol accusing Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek of depending upon a version of “self-realization” as the great empty void at the center of their economic doctrines.96 You can’t realize a Kantian essence that is not there.
Whatever else it betokens in the neoliberal pantheon, it is axiomatic that freedom can only be “negative” for neoliberals (in the sense of Isaiah Berlin), for one very important reason. Freedom cannot be extended from the use of knowledge in society to the use of knowledge about society, because self-examination concerning why one passively accepts local and incomplete knowledge leads to contemplation of how market signals create some forms of knowledge and squelch others. Meditation upon our limitations leads to inquiry into how markets work, and metareflection on our place in larger orders, something that neoliberals warn is beyond our ken. Knowledge then assumes global institutional dimensions, and this undermines the key doctrine of the market as transcendental superior information processor. Conveniently, “freedom” does not extend to principled rejection of the neoliberal insurgency. Neoliberals want to insist that resistance to their program is futile, since it inevitably appeals to a spurious (from their perspective) understanding of freedom.
[8] Neoliberals begin with a presumption that capital has a natural right to flow freely across national boundaries. (The free flow of labor enjoys no similar right.97) Since that entails persistent balance-of-payments problems in a nonautarkic world, neoliberals took the lead in inventing all manner of transnational devices for the economic and political discipline of nation-states.98 They began by attempting to reintroduce what they considered to be pure market discipline (flexible exchange rates, dismantling capital controls) during the destruction of the Bretton Woods system, but over the longer term learned to appreciate that suitably staffed international institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, and other units are better situated to impose neoliberal policies upon
