Neoliberalism's Demons

On the Political Theology of Late Capital

Adam Kotsko

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503607132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By both its supporters and detractors, neoliberalism is usually considered an economic policy agenda. Neoliberalism's Demons argues that it is much more than that: a complete worldview, neoliberalism presents the competitive marketplace as the model for true human flourishing. And it has enjoyed great success: from the struggle for "global competitiveness" on the world stage down to our individual practices of self-branding and social networking, neoliberalism has transformed every aspect of our shared social life.

The book explores the sources of neoliberalism's remarkable success and the roots of its current decline. Neoliberalism's appeal is its promise of freedom in the form of unfettered free choice. But that freedom is a trap: we have just enough freedom to be accountable for our failings, but not enough to create genuine change. If we choose rightly, we ratify our own exploitation. And if we choose wrongly, we are consigned to the outer darkness—and then demonized as the cause of social ills. By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism, arguing that, far from breaking with the neoliberal model, it actually doubles down on neoliberalism's most destructive features.

CHAPTER 1

THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF LATE CAPITAL

Neoliberalism loves to hide. On the increasingly frequent but still rare occasions when the term appears in the mainstream media, it is always in the context of an introductory treatment.¹ Strangely, one can never assume that the educated public is already acquainted with the force that has deeply shaped public policy and economic outcomes for a generation or more in the major Western countries and much of the developing world. For its advocates, as for those shaped by the “common sense” of mainstream political discussion, it is not a particular ideology nor even an ideology at all. It is simply the way things are, the set of “realistic” policies that “work.” This very invisibility is a measure of its power, and the fact that the word can now be uttered in public is a sign that its planetary sway is growing less secure.

The term itself is slippery. It is first of all a periodizing concept that names the political-economic model that grew out of the crisis of the postwar settlement known as Fordism; hence it is in principle purely descriptive. At the same time it is a conceptual weapon for left-wing critics who take aim at all that is oppressive and alienating in our present world. So on the one hand, one might observe, seemingly neutrally, that whereas Fordism favored high taxation to limit inequality, energetic regulation of industry to make sure it serves social goals, strong labor unions that help workers claim their fair share, and careful control of international trade to protect domestic industry, neoliberalism has tended to pursue the reverse in all these areas: reducing taxes to increase the capital available for investment, deregulation to subject firms to market discipline rather than bureaucratic control, flexible labor markets that maximize efficiency and profitability, and free trade that breaks down arbitrary national boundaries to prosperity. Yet even though I have attempted to present it in positive terms that neoliberals themselves would accept, the very designation of the latter agenda as “neoliberal” implies a negative judgment of those developments.

This halo of negativity results partly from the fact that neoliberal is almost never used as a term of self-designation—though here, as with seemingly every generalization about neoliberalism, there are exceptions. Most notably, one of the movement’s greatest theorists and propagandists, Milton Friedman, used the term in something like its contemporary sense in his 1951 essay “Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects.”² In this short text Friedman laments that in his time “legislation is still largely dominated by the trend of opinion toward collectivism” (3) and that even where the right manages an electoral victory, its leaders are still “infected by the intellectual air they breathe” (4). Yet the collectivist faith has encountered undeniable obstacles, and Friedman is confident that a new trend in public opinion is beginning to develop, one that makes room for a return to the tenets of classical nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism but without that movement’s naive antistatism. What Friedman describes in this lecture is identifiable as the contemporary neoliberal agenda, in which the state actively cultivates and maintains the conditions necessary for vigorous market competition, trusting in the price mechanism to deliver more efficient outcomes than direct state planning ever could. Hence his use of the term neo-liberalism: it is not a question of simply “returning” to traditional laissez-faire by getting the state out of the way, but of using state policy as a means to actively create a new version of classical liberalism.

Much in Friedman’s text appears prophetic in retrospect, but one detail in particular is simply uncanny. In an offhand remark, he notes that “some twenty years or more may elapse between a change in the underlying current of opinion and the resultant alteration in public policy” (3). Right on schedule, one of the signal events in the transition from Fordism to neoliberalism happened twenty years after Friedman wrote his article: Nixon’s decision in 1971 to go off the gold standard, which broke with the Bretton Woods settlement that had governed international finance throughout the postwar era and inadvertently cleared the space for the fluctuating exchange rates that proved so central to the rise of contemporary finance capitalism. Only two years later, the oil crisis ushered in the period of “stagflation,” a combination of slow economic growth and high inflation that should not have been possible in terms of the regnant Keynesian economics of the time and that proved unresponsive to the standard mix of policies Keynesianism prescribed.

The moment for a new economic model had arrived, and the theorists and propagandists of neoliberalism—the group that Philip Mirowski calls the Neoliberal Thought Collective—were ready to seize the opportunity.³ And once they gained ascendancy, they set up a self-reinforcing system that not only persisted but expanded for decades. Even the Global Financial Crisis, far from toppling the neoliberal order, strengthened its stranglehold on the terms of debate, despite the fact that no major economist had predicted it and most neoliberal policy prescriptions actually worsened the economic slump they were meant to solve. Admittedly, this amazing prescience and persistence is difficult to square with the tenets of neoliberal theory, which in popular presentations appears to amount to a simplistic libertarianism that would seem more at home in a college dorm room than in the most prestigious economics departments in the world. But in another turn of the screw, the neoliberal order has given rise to financial engineering of mind-boggling complexity, deploying the expertise of PhD physicists and massive computing power to gain a competitive edge in the market.

Thus neoliberalism is both a descriptive and a polemical term to describe an ideology whose adherents mostly refuse to admit that it exists, which is at once stunningly foresighted and vulnerable to unpredictable crises and which was masterfully implemented by Machiavellian geniuses who often appear to be as intellectually sophisticated as a teenager who has just discovered Ayn Rand. Clearly, we are dealing with a strange phenomenon, and the academic literature surrounding neoliberalism reflects the contradictions in its elusive object. While the basic content of neoliberalism—both its ideological agenda and the results that follow from it—is not subject to serious dispute, no settled agreement exists on how to articulate those features into a coherent whole. To illustrate my point, I will briefly present a few of the most influential approaches to this question.

David Harvey’s strategy, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, is to put forward the concrete results as the key to interpreting neoliberalism.⁴ From Harvey’s Marxist perspective, neoliberalism is the latest front in the class struggle, undoing the postwar gains of the working class through the formation and enrichment of a new capitalist class and the immiseration of workers. Although Harvey does draw attention to the fact that neoliberalism has “become hegemonic as a mode of discourse” and has been thoroughly “incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world,”⁵ he ultimately dismisses the policy agenda as incoherent and the ideology as essentially irrelevant. Indeed, it is only the class element that is definitive of neoliberalism for Harvey, so that China—which is far from embracing the Washington Consensus on an ideological or policy level, as shown by the fact that it still promulgates communist-style five-year plans that imply a level of direct state planning completely incompatible with neoliberalism—can appear as an exemplar of neoliberalism due solely to the emergence of a new capitalist class in recent decades.⁶ Yet if neoliberalism is simply the bourgeoisie’s revenge, then how can Harvey account for the fact that it is precisely a new capitalist class that is created?⁷ And how can he find a place for neoliberal thinkers like Friedman, those strange “organic intellectuals” who preexisted, and contributed to the creation of, the very class that their ideas came to serve?

It is this group that Mirowski highlights with his notion of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. One could walk away from Harvey’s account viewing the major figures of neoliberalism as dispensable figureheads for impersonal political and economic forces. By contrast, the most compact possible summary of Mirowski’s book would be: “It’s people! Neoliberalism is made out of people!” In this reading there was nothing inevitable about neoliberalism’s rise, which depended on the vision and organization of particular nameable individuals. For Mirowski, the apparent incoherence in neoliberal ideology and policy making is the product of the political strategy of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, which feeds the general public a simplified version of neoliberal dogma, providing its agenda with a veneer of popular legitimacy, while a more flexible and realistic esoteric doctrine guides the actual policy implementation. In other words, the discursive elements that Harvey tends to dismiss are an integral part of neoliberalism’s initial political success and its ongoing self-reproduction.

For Wendy Brown, by contrast, the results that Harvey and Mirowski attribute to a political struggle are precisely the death of politics.⁸ Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s articulation of Aristotle’s distinction between the political and the economic realms, Brown portrays neoliberalism as an attempt to extinguish the political—here represented by the liberal democratic tradition of popular sovereignty and self-rule—and consign humanity to a purely economic existence. In the end Brown calls us to take up a strange kind of metapolitical struggle against the economic enemy, in defense of politics as such. Meanwhile, Jodi Dean, who agrees that neoliberalism has a depoliticizing tendency, argues that this depoliticization actually depends on the notion of democracy and that appeals to democracy against neoliberalism are therefore doomed in advance.⁹

As ever, the Protean slipperiness of neoliberalism seems to defy analysis. Is neoliberal ideology a smokescreen for a political agenda, or is it integral to the whole? Is neoliberalism actually properly political at all, or does it instead spell the death of politics? Does neoliberalism undermine democracy, or does it rely on it for its own legitimation? What exactly are we dealing with here?

This situation is very strange. As I have already noted, for academic commentators, in stark contrast to the sometimes willful ignorance found in mainstream debate, the attributes and effects of neoliberalism appear more or less self-evident; that is to say, there should seemingly be no dispute about what neoliberalism is. Yet in what almost amounts to a parody of the atomistic individualism of our contemporary order, there sometimes seem to be as many concepts of neoliberalism as there are commentators. There is, however, a broad consensus on which theoretical tools are most helpful in this regard, insofar as the dominant perspectives for dealing with neoliberalism are Marxism (an obvious fit for a critique of contemporary capitalism) and Foucauldianism (equally obvious in light of Foucault’s shockingly prescient account of the formative stages of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics).¹⁰ Other approaches, such as psychoanalysis,¹¹ have made themselves felt in this debate, but Marxism and Foucauldianism remain the key points of reference in essentially every major treatment of neoliberalism.¹²

The present study is on one level no exception to this trend, insofar as I draw extensively on works from both traditions. Yet I will largely sidestep the Marx-Foucault debate by using a different interpretive framework as my starting point: namely, political theology. This move is admittedly counterintuitive on two levels. First, the meaning of political theology is arguably as contested as that of neoliberalism, if not more so; thus, I risk attempting to use the unknown to clarify the unknown. Second, within the literature itself, engagement with neoliberalism has often been taken to entail a rejection or subordination of the concerns most often associated with political theology.¹³

In what follows, I will not be arbitrarily asserting my own vision of political theology and then applying it to neoliberalism, nor will I be castigating previous analysts of neoliberalism for the supposed mistake of neglecting political theology. In point of fact, the meaning of political theology is unclear. This is not because people are unaccountably failing to grasp it but because from its very inception, the concept of political theology is entangled with a political agenda that is presented in an indirect and partially concealed manner—neoliberalism is not the only thing that loves to hide. This intentionally misleading rhetorical strategy has led to durable blind spots and deadlocks within the field of political theology itself, which have in turn created a situation in which diagnosticians of neoliberalism understandably do not see political theology as a suitable tool for their endeavors.

My goal in staging this largely missed encounter, then, is not only to demonstrate what political theology has to offer to the study of neoliberalism. I am equally concerned to develop a new and more capacious concept of political theology. My wager is that the encounter between political theology and neoliberalism—precisely because it is counterintuitive and seemingly unnatural—will provide a uniquely productive path toward a renewed political theology. To put it differently, if I want to use political theology as a tool to get at neoliberalism, I will need to rebuild and rearticulate the concept of political theology as I go. It is less a question of applying a method to an object than of taking up a particular object in order to force changes in the method.

This chapter will lay the groundwork for this mutual illumination of political theology and neoliberalism. After giving an overview of political theology as it is generally understood in contemporary academic debates, I will provide a basic account of how this relatively narrow vision of political theology (and the themes taken to be most directly related to it) have fared in discussions of neoliberalism. I will then give a counterreading of Schmitt’s foundational work Political Theology, demonstrating that the very text that gives rise to that constricted view also plants the seeds for a more flexible approach to political theology. Finally, I will sketch out an initial reading of neoliberalism not only as a possible object for political theology, but as an exemplary one.

Staging a Missed Encounter

Hearing the term political theology for the first time, one would likely be drawn to two possible hypotheses about its meaning. On the one hand, one might assume that political theology means politically engaged theology. Depending on one’s perspective, sympathetic examples may spring to mind, such as the theology of Martin Luther King Jr., or Latin American liberation theology, or perhaps more reactionary options like the theology of the US religious right. In either case it would be a question of carrying theologically based normative claims into the political realm. On the other hand, political theology may evoke phenomena of quasi-religious fervor directed at political figures and movements, such as a “personality cult” around a charismatic leader. Thus, political theology could refer either to religiously informed political action or to practices that seem to treat politics as a religion.

Both of these definitions are attested in the literature. For instance, Jacob Taubes’s lecture course The Political Theology of Paul presents the Apostle as a theologically motivated rebel against Roman hegemony. Taubes claims that “the Epistle to the Romans is a political theology, a political declaration of war on the Caesar,” and that “Christian literature is a literature of protest against the flourishing cult of the emperor.”¹⁴ The latter cult would in turn represent a political theology of the inverse variety.

With these two possible meanings in mind, we could say that political theology, as an academic discipline, is concerned with all crossings between the political and the theological realms, in either direction. The guiding assumption of political theology as a research program is that such crossings are not rare or remarkable, but in fact happen all the time—including in the ostensibly secular modern world. The central methodological credo is encapsulated in this frequently quoted passage from Schmitt’s Political Theology: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Political Theology of Late Capital
• 2. The Political and the Economic
• 3. Neoliberalism’s Demons
• 4. This Present Darkness
• Conclusion: After Neoliberalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index