Sovereignty, Norms, and Exception in Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism and Sovereignty: An Odd Couple?

Neoliberalism is notorious not only because of the various effects attributed to its continued “ecological dominance”¹ as a real-world phenomenon but also because of the difficulties in pinning it down conceptually. The meanings associated with the term vary between disciplines and subfields, supporters and critics, as well as political and scholarly contexts. As is well known, if the term neoliberalism is invoked at all in political debates, it is never used as a self-description but always refers to others, and as such it is usually intended to stigmatize them as egotistic market fundamentalists.² That the term is easily instrumentalized for purely polemical purposes is in part due to the blurred, unfixed contours of the concept of neoliberalism.

For those who think of neoliberalism broadly along such market fundamentalist lines, the aim of this article, namely, to inquire into the notion of sovereignty as a particular aspect of neoliberalism’s political theory, may seem all but nonsensical. If neoliberalism can in effect be summed up as a creed of market fundamentalism and a commitment to “turbo-capitalism” that sweeps away everything that stands in the way of a further extension of the market zone to every last corner of erstwhile non-economic spheres of society, then what use could its intellectual dimension have for a political theory? From a neoliberal perspective, what is there to be known about states other than how to run them like a business by using management techniques developed in the private sector, and how to subject them to pressures analogous to the competition that corporations face on economic markets to make them operate more efficiently? To be sure, there is a kernel of truth to this depiction of neoliberalism, but I would argue that, at the most, this is but one of its varieties, which is located right at the theoretical boundaries that separate neoliberalism from its intellectual cousin, libertarianism. Neoliberalism as I will define it in the next section is by no means exhaustively described as a theoretical commitment to “self-regulating markets,” implying that there is no real need for some kind of public regulating authority. To the contrary, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that neoliberal thought in most of its currents and varieties relies upon the state to fulfill crucial functions for the establishment and reproduction of a society according to neoliberal design. Furthermore, because of the indispensability of state functions of a certain kind, neoliberal thought also has to ponder other aspects of political theory that are state-related, such as the status of democracy and questions of sovereignty. True, neoliberals demonize certain aspects of the state, especially the welfare state, and harbor unwavering suspicions about governments considered to pose a permanent threat to their citizens. Yet this does not keep those thinkers from developing more or less coherent and elaborate arguments with regard to many aspects of political theory, notably the state and sovereignty. Admittedly, these arguments sometimes remain implicit and rudimentary, but the article proceeds from the starting assumption that there is a political theory contained in neoliberal thought that may be reconstructed, and then can be subjected to critical scrutiny.

The article is structured as follows. The first step is to explain my own understanding of neoliberalism and, accordingly, to delineate who might legitimately be considered a contributor to the body of neoliberal thought. Based on this, I will survey, that is to some extent reconstruct, a number of neoliberal positions regarding sovereignty. More precisely, I will introduce an analytical distinction³ between three “varieties” of neoliberal thought on sovereignty that might be described somewhat simplistically as the sovereign as umpire, the sovereign as Odysseus, and the sovereign as oscillating between rules and exception (for lack of a fitting metaphor). Aside from examining the way in which sovereignty is approached and discussed by neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich August von Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, I will also try to problematize these accounts in various ways, albeit far from exhaustively. In a final short and rather exploratory step I...