Putting the Market in Its Places

The term neoliberalism groups a number of dispositions that have been kicking around since at least the dawn of capitalism, but have insinuated themselves in the political and economic order with a particular vigor over the past four decades. On a general level, neoliberal rhetoric celebrates a starkly minimal, market-based species of individual freedom and disdains most forms of binding collective association and institutional authority, except those forms that protect and advance the formal conditions for neoliberal freedom—such as the courts and the military. Deriving from the contrarian writings of midcentury economists such as Alexander Rüstow, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, neoliberalism is characterized by its defenders as the return to primacy of the “classical” liberalism of Adam Smith, William Graham Sumner, and other theorists of the first and second industrial revolutions, who advocated the autonomy of the capitalist market from government influence; hence its association with “conservative” thought. Neoliberals herald this ostensible restoration as sweeping away the aberrant Progressive and Keynesian eras, during which a redistributive and therapeutic ethos guided state intervention into the matrix of social, economic, and political activity known as society.

The twentieth-century events and conditions in the global north that made neoliberalism possible were the New Deal’s rescue of industrial and finance capitalism, the warfare state’s massive infusions of capital into domestic and foreign economies, the formal delegitimation of imperialism and white supremacy, the state’s periodic efforts to meliorate the most destabilizing forms of poverty and inequality, the paranoid politics of the cold war, the social discord and economic malaise of the 1970s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy and institutional influence, U.S. and British proponents of neoliberalism in business, politics, academia, and religion used the racial, class, and gender rebellions of the 1960s and ’70s to construct a relatively coherent ideology that coded the reactionary disaffection of the majority in a seemingly innocuous vocabulary (“bootstraps,” “self-empowerment,” “responsibility,” and, of course, “freedom”) that obscured the retrenchment of various forms of privilege. By the early 1980s, apostles of neoliberalism had been elected or appointed to high office in regimes in Great Britain, the United States, Chile, and, ironically, China, and ensconced in powerful nongovernmental organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund. Developed in northern Europe, distilled at the University of Chicago, neoliberalism was imposed first on the global south (and unraveled there first, by the early 2000s’ Latin American “left turn”), at the moment of imperialism’s evolution from the old model of occupation and administration to a more recent strategy of the cultivation of client states.

Neoliberalism’s visible economic agenda of privatization, deregulation, casualization of labor, and excision of state expenditure not tied to empire building, enforcement of property law, or punishment forms a sort of façade for an even more transformational intervention at the level of subjectivity. This enterprise could be glimpsed in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s then-bizarre assertion in 1987 that “there is no such thing as ‘society.’” Supplanting “society,” evoking as it does discernable, superindividual structures of causality and obligation, is the preferred reification of neoliberals, “the market,” which admits of no solidarity but the aggregated transactions of free, self-interested individuals whose successes and failures owe only to themselves. Subscribing to and conceiving of oneself as inhabiting this utopian revision of the world is a highly consequential act of subjectification approaching the religious. As Thatcher, evidently channeling Marx and Foucault, asserted, neoliberal economics were ultimately a means “to change the heart and soul.”¹

Given such an end, it is not surprising that so many academics across the...