Interest as Verb: Critiquing the Neoliberal Conception of Interest – Mathiowetz’s Appeals to Interest

This book goes a long way toward correcting what might be seen as the hegemony of psychologically based theories of interest. I invoke the language of hegemony because Dean Mathiowetz makes it clear, especially in the Epilogue, that he situates the project in terms of Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe’s work. But this is also the work of a well-read scholar of Early Modern political thought, grounded in perceptive re-readings of texts ancestrally articulated in relation to American discourse on law, natural rights, and as Mathiowetz convincingly argues early in the book, the contemporary political landscape.

The opening chapter positions the politics of interest by way of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas (2004), which appeals to a concept of interest as a universal psychological state largely taken for granted by contemporary discourse. This psychological state, which is primarily “calculating self-regard” or “rational motivation” is taken as given. Yet Mathiowetz argues that interest should be seen as an activity, and specifically as an activity of subject formation that is never complete. To explicate this, Mathiowetz makes a distinction between “the economic and humanistic roots of interest” and the legal side of interests as having a “suggestion of authoritative ties between persons and their properties” that he terms “juridical” (7). Linked to the juridical notion that he highlights is a plural aspect that locates/situates interests in political contexts, suggesting “the improbability, if not the impossibility, of arriving at an uncontested statement of anyone’s interest” (8). This way of looking at interest does not simply dismiss interest-speak as “ideological window-dressing and false consciousness,” but instead offers contemporary political theorists an approach that appreciates “nonrational or intersubjective” aspects of interests usually neglected by psychologically-based approaches (11).

Part of this neglect is due to the ontological privileging of the individual that often accompanies contemporary appeals to interest. But because he treats “an appeal to interest as an ascription of the identity to the body said to be interested, which awaits further action for its realization” it can be a “potent heuristic for understanding modern political agency” (19). This is because interested bodies are both in the process of becoming and are never fully fixed and unitary in his view; and they become in relationship with other bodies. Both individual and group bodies have a “temporal identity” that is “never fully consolidated” (21). This is often hard to see, according to Mathiowetz, because from the 1950-1970’s the relevance of almost anything besides self-regarding calculation was “edged out of political studies” (24). However, he argues that by rereading juridical interest up to the 17th century we can recover a language of interest that resists some key assumptions of neoliberalism; namely monism and sovereign agency (25). The idea that interests are pre political and psychological is indicative of an assumption of ontological individualism which is intricately reinforcing of the fiction that we exist as sovereign agents who either know or don’t know our own singular interests.

In order to demonstrate the critical capacity of appeals to interest, Mathiowetz follows others who have interpreted the history of interest as a “window into elements of modern subjectivity,” but focuses more on the practice of Roman law, and in particular the formulation Id quod interest, which stands for “that which matters,” “that which is of importance,” or “that which makes a difference” (33). The basic argument in this regard is that interest has come to stand for a propensity for calculating self-regard that has been read backwards into the history of the term, the corrective to which is to unearth the plural and juridical aspects that complicate the fixity of the term that has now become familiar in both public parlance and in scholarship. Moreover, tied to this is the (now) obvious connection of the term interest to matters of finance. The notion that interests...