Sociology and Neoliberalism: A Missing History

The American Sociologist, 2023

Charles Thorpe argues sociology lacks a "language of society as a whole." He holds that positivist sociologists de-legitimated holistic theories or broad normatively oriented "social theories," leaving the discipline without discursive means to critically assess and deliberate its overall directions and those of society. Thorpe does not address holistic theory directly or explain how it differs analytically from standard "sociological theory." My intent is to clarify these matters by extending facets of his argument to illuminate the interdependence between holistic theorizing and empirical-historical social science, which is necessary to create the type of "reflexive sociology" that Thorpe argues would make sociology more cosmopolitan and capable of addressing the turbulent sociopolitical conditions in the interregnum after neoliberalism.

Over the last thirty years a growing body of scholarship across the social sciences has deployed and developed the concept and terminology of neoliberalism. Since exploding in the early 1990s, its usage has not only surpassed related terms (“libertarian” “Washington Consensus” “financialization”) in academic research but has enjoyed exceptional success in public discourses as well (Venugopal 2015) The term has been identified with a variety of large-scale processes and seemingly contradictory trends. As a policy agenda of liberalization and regulatory retrenchment, its implementation over the last thirty years has entailed a massive increase in the volume and complexity of legal rules (Vogel 1996, Braithwaite 2008). As a discourse rooted in the valorization of individual freedom, it has facilitated the consolidation of collective power and, in some contexts, justified the expansion of incarceration and surveillance (Brown 2015, Harcourt 2011) As a political project associated most often with Reagan and Thatcher's efforts to lower taxes and weaken labour power (Harvey 2005), its advance has coincided with a paradoxical combination of rising national inequality measures and a flattening of the global inequality distribution (Milanovic 2012). What initially appeared as disagreements about the origins and causes of the neoliberal ascendance have now come into view as more fundamental divides over the nature of the concept itself. For some, neoliberalism is a set of economic policies enacted all over the world since the 1970s; for Marxists, the result of the resurgent power of global financial elites; for readers of Foucault, it names transformations of political rationality and subjectivity corresponding to an economization of all social life. (Flew 2014) These conceptualizations are nonetheless united by an implied periodization. Neoliberalism promises to mark off the present from the past, emphasizes the underlying continuity of capitalism, and evokes nostalgia for a post-WWII Golden Age. Given this unifying thread, differences in usage may reflect deeper differences about the salient aspects of social order, the nature of social change and proper governance of political order. Thus, debates over “neoliberalism” may serve as a proxy for more fundamental divisions over theory and norm, method and discipline. Recent years have witnessed a number of countervailing trends. A growing genre of research has developed critiques of the concept's theoretical fungibility and drawn on the multiplicity of its valences in practice to seriously question its explanatory value. (Venugopal 2015, Boas & Gan-Morse 2009) Research depending on the concept has nonetheless continued to intensify, and to jump further across disciplinary lines, becoming a centre point of symposia and special collections in a number of fields (Grewal Purdy 2014, Birch Springer 2016) Finally, scholars have increasingly reached into the past, long before the crisis of the 1970s, to find institutional, philosophical and conceptual precursors of today's neoliberal practices. (Gane 2012, Kipnis 2008) In the context of these trends, this workshop offers a momentary opportunity for methodological reflexivity. In an interdisciplinary group that includes historians and sociologists, legal scholars and moral philosophers, political scientists and others, participants will be invited to present, reframe and contextualize their own work in a way that reflects on the analytical, normative and critical value of “neoliberalism.” What insights does the term bring to sites of research left undertheorized by other concepts? Beyond naming and identifying aspects of the world, concepts draw things together and keep other things from view. What analytical connections does “neoliberalism” facilitate, and what processes does it obscure? What new spaces of understanding does the concept open up, and how? On the other hand, what are the risks and pitfalls of leaning too heavily on the term? When might it be time, to borrow a phrase, “to take a break from neoliberalism?” (c.f. Halley 2006). By providing a setting to compare approaches across methodological differences, we hope to not only map the uses of neoliberalism (Ferguson 2010), but to learn something about the origins of the present and, more broadly, about the promises of critically engaged social science.

What is new about neoliberalism? Such a question immediately implies that certain objects and processes can be defined as ‘neoliberal’ and, importantly, that the contents of the ‘neo’ can be explained by reference to a larger phenomenon called liberalism. A veritable galaxy of things are now attached to the term neoliberalism, if not as some primary identifying marker then at least as one descriptive property among others. This chapter seeks to offer a window through which to problematise and analyze this core if recalcitrant question. In keeping with other debates in the social sciences, it proposes that the frame of neoliberalism tries to capture something about developments in capitalism since the 1970s, with commodification, financialisation, and general moves towards ‘market-based’ modes of regulation or governmentality being major debates in the literature (Harvey 2005; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, 2010; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2012; Springer 2010). While accepting this temporal frame as a starting point, the chapter seeks to contextualise the history of neoliberalism in two ways. First, the chapter sheds a sharper light on the relationship between capitalism and its mechanisms of legitimation, particularly at the level of everyday experience. Second, within the inevitable space constraints, the argument traces certain threads of meaning that connect the history of the liberal tradition to the present, specifically the themes of individualism, universalism, and meliorism. Thus, the chapter aims to reveal how justifications for neoliberal capitalist practices are the product of a long history of social struggles that are, moreover, often confusing, multifarious, and even contradictory. Ironically, once this perspective is recognised, the task of deciphering contemporary neoliberalism arguably becomes harder, particularly concerning efforts to understand where certain ideas and values tied to neoliberalism acquire their commonsensical power. If neoliberalism is a moving concept then scholarship needs to be equally adept at moving with it.

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is 'oft-invoked but ill-defined'. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: (1) an all-purpose denunciatory category; (2) 'the way things are'; (3) an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; (4) a dominant ideology of global capitalism; (5) a form of governmentality and hegemony; and (6) a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978-9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault's account of historical change complementing Max Weber's work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms.

2019

2019

Neoliberalism is a constructivist and immoderate project with hegemony underpinning its purpose. Inherent in hegemony is the tyrannical theory that no social force, regardless of its usefulness to the world, must share the same self-preservation value with empire-building hegemon concealing as an entrepreneur. The purpose of the paper is to unveil the subjectivism, exceptionalism, prescriptivism, and illiberalism underlining neoliberalism. Methodologically, and for purposes of conceptualization, analysis, suggestion, and direction for future research, dialectical inquiry method was adopted. This methodology lends credence to diversity as a universal fact. It claims that fact and value are mutually exclusive and that universal fact must not be sacrificed for ideological value. We contended that, the cliché, there is no alternative to neoliberalism is a political and psychological conditioning to prevent spirited others from tackling the problem of beginning. Meanwhile, as a second-ot...

2021

This article analyses 'Neoliberalism' from a historical perspective, as a transnational political movement with a strong epistemic bent, engaged in reconfiguring state institutions and building a competitive market order. Drawing on methodological insights from Intellectual History and Political Economy, it focuses on the epistemic engagement of early Neoliberal thinkers in the field of historiography. By examining the writings of prominent intellectuals who participated in the Mont Pèlerin Society, such as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, T.S. Ashton, Walter Eucken, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, the article assesses the role of historical interpretation in Neoliberal discourse, highlighting its connection with economic theory.

Neoliberalism has been one of the most hotly contested themes in academic and political debate over the last thirty years. Given the global and pervasive influence of neoliberal ideas on contemporary styles of governance, social-service provision, and public policy this intensive interest is understandable. At the same time, the use of the term has become loose, vague, and over-extended, particularly in the extensive critical literature. Rather than engage in further critique, or in the reconstruction of the history of neoliberalism, this volume seeks to bring analytical clarity to the ongoing debate. Much of the critique of neo-liberalism takes its cue from radical – which usually means neo-Marxist – political economy. In contrast, we adopt a political reading that draws inspiration from the work of the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi. Reading Polanyi as one of the last representatives of classical, modernist social theory, we seek to counter both political-economic and postmodernist accounts of contemporary market societies. The reforms proposed by advocates of neoliberalism and implemented by governments follow a modernist logic of increased rationalization and the centralization of power rather than a market or network logic. One implication of this analysis is that far from reducing the power of state and bureaucracy – as is commonly assumed – markets have increasingly become the instruments of choice for states seeking to reduce costs and responsibility while maintaining – or increasing – control. These arguments are developed via (i) an analytical framework which identifies the key instruments of neoliberal governance (privatization, marketization, and liberalization) and the agents caught in a ‘three-level game’; (ii) case studies that examine the development of neoliberal instruments (reform of the British civil service); their refinement (reform of higher education in England and Wales); their dissemination across national borders (EU integration policies). Rather than look back nostalgically on the post-war welfare-state settlement, in the final chapter we ask why the coalitions that supported that settlement broke down in the face of the neoliberal reform movement.

The debate in this journal on neoliberalism neatly illustrates Nietzsche’s proposition that ‘all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined’ (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]: 53). This claim is implicit in Daniel Goldstein’s remarks about the ‘surprisingly thin’ trope of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and, more pointedly, about how many anthropologists invoke neoliberalism ‘as a sort of explanatory catholicon’ (2012: 304). Even authors who accept that neoliberalism is a valid analytical object still differ over the entry points they adopt to establish its essential qualities – referring variously to a particular genealogy, a particular time period, a particular case or set of cases or a particular policy field. Others deny that neoliberalism has a quintessential form, insisting on its diverse origins, continuous reinvention, diverse local instantiations or variegated nature, without, however, asking what this polymorphic, even polymorphous, ‘it’ might comprise. The result is that neoliberalism tends to become a ‘chaotic concept’. In this context, it is interesting to note that this term is more often used by outsiders and critics of neoliberalism than it is by the advocates and supporters of the ideas, institutions, strategies and policies that this slippery concept is said to denote. For these reasons, as some contributions to this debate also indicate, neoliberalism may serve more as a socially constructed term of struggle (Kampfbegriff) that frames criticism and resistance than as a rigorously defined concept that can guide research in anthropology and other social sciences.