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The Ungovernable Society
A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism
Grégoire Chamayou
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
Originally published as La société ingouvernable © La Fabrique Éditions, 2018
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices Logo designed by Serge Bloch.
Illustrations from R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach © Cambridge University Press, 2010, reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4202-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chamayou, Grégoire, author. | Brown, Andrew, translator.
Title: The ungovernable society : a genealogy of authoritarian liberalism / Grégoire Chamayou ; translated by Andrew Brown.
Other titles: Société ingouvernable. English
Description: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A brilliant work that shows how the political contours of our contemporary neoliberal societies took shape in the crisis-laden decade of the 1970s”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032896 (print) | LCCN 2020032897 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542000 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542017 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542024 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Free enterprise--History. | Capitalism--History. | Liberalism--History. | Labor discipline--History.
Classification: LCC HB95 .C47613 2021(print) | LCC HB95(ebook) | DDC 330.12/2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032896 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032897
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FOREWORD
Grégoire Chamayou’s book should be read as an important contribution to the study of neoliberalism – or whatever we are to call the great renewal of reactionary thought that emerged in the 1970s and still dominates our society today. In fact, he contributes to the literature on neoliberalism while simultaneously rejecting that term neoliberalism itself – or, rather, fundamentally reorienting our understanding of it.
Chamayou accomplishes this reorientation, in part, by giving voice and priority to intellectual and political figures that have largely been left out of the standard accounts. He orchestrates wonderfully the conservative and reactionary chorus in the United States in the battle of ideas that in the 1970s arrived at a new hegemony. He does, of course, engage with and give insightful interpretations of the well-known protagonists of neoliberal economics, such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. But the standard focus on such figures leads too often to a conception of neoliberalism as a single, coherent project. Chamayou demonstrates, instead, that the movement was profoundly heterogeneous.
In fact, one of the most innovative aspects of the book is, in my view, the way Chamayou delves deeply into the literature emerging in the 1970s on management and managerialism, which in many respects diverges significantly from neoliberal economics. Managers, business leaders and management theorists, rather than thinking only in economic terms, constructed a political project, opposing workplace democracy, for instance, in order to preserve the authority of the ‘private government’ of the firm. Management theorists developed a practical, strategic conception of governance, no longer aimed internally within the individual business but instead oriented outward: an expansive notion of strategic management intended to govern also the social world outside of the firm, ruling over workers, shareholders, consumers and other social forces, as if in concentric waves. These lesser known authors of management theory are in Chamayou’s argument just as important as the well-known neoliberal economists, if not more so, in developing the new paradigm. By highlighting their perspective and their importance, he casts the entire project in a new light.
A second way that Chamayou reorients our understanding of this movement is by emphasizing its internally varied and political character. This is particularly apparent from the analyses of strategic management. Rather than analysing neoliberalism as a solely or even primarily
