Neoliberalism and Democracy

International Studies Review, 2014

Neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that claims that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade . It was first implemented in Chile in the seventies, when the United States of America supported and plotted the coup d'état of Pinochet to fire the socialist president Allende. Since its beginnings it has been changing the relation between the state and the society and, because of globalization, it is becoming the homogeneous economic theory in the world.

Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.

Societies Without Borders, 2009

Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, 2018

Since the early 1980s, with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency and Paul Volcker to the Chair of the US Federal Reserve, neoliberalism has increasingly placed the world under its ideological sway. By means of their obeisance to such key international institutions as the IMF and the World Bank, more and more developing nations have found themselves being systematically integrated into the US imperial order. Neoliberalism is commonly associated with such features as "free trade, free capital movements, reduced government or equivalently free markets." 1 To quote Harvey's famous observation on the role of the state in a neoliberal era: "The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defense, police and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist … then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture." 2 It is worth noting that not everyone agrees with the neoliberal idea of "small government." Even the model of the state encapsulated in Harvey's observation strays quite far from the model of a minimalist state regime, and the neoliberalism of both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher offer testimony to this point of view. As Saad-Filho argues, "Neoliberalism is based on the systematic use of state power to impose a hegemonic project of recomposition of the rule of capital under the guise of 'non-intervention.'" 3

Clover for helping me to think about the material below.) This paper is a very cursory exploration of neoliberalism as a concept. It is impossible to survey the vast amount of work on this topic. There are three things I hope to do instead: mention some key currents, articulate where I find the term more and less useful as an attempt to grasp contemporary social reality, and consider what the rise of reference to neoliberalism itself indexes.

Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.

There is a growing scholarly literature on neoliberalism that goes beyond the boogeyman conceptions of neoliberalism to seriously address the complicated relationship between neoliberal theory, democracy, and authoritarianism in a way that avoids both hyperbole and excessive reverence. This paper is a worthwhile addition to this debate although it advances some questionable interpretations and does not bring that much new on the table. On the positive side, it is engagingly written, mostly fair to the sources it cites, and its normative conclusions are reasonable, although I disagree with some of them. On the negative side, there are some factual inaccuracies and overgeneralizations that deserve addressing, including with regard to Schmitt, Hayek, and authoritarianism, and with regard to the issue of monopoly capitalism. I will limit my observations on these two topics. Let me start from the issue of monopolies. There was one sentence that surprised me: "Neoliberal market fundamentalism differs from neoclassical fundamentalism in its acceptance of mergers and acquisitions, thus serving the profit interests of 'big money' that exploit the idea of a unified global economic order (Wren-Lewis 2017)." Before discussing the factual accuracy of this statement, let me discuss the latter half of this statement. The normative judgment, here, is ambiguous on whether neoliberalism, according to the author, is merely accidentally complicit in the profit interests of 'big money' or whether it, in fact, is consciously conspiring to advance the interests of big business. As a throwaway line, it is rather reckless and in sharp contrast to some of the more measured statements in the piece. As the author elsewhere points out, neoliberals saw themselves as champions of consumer welfare. As a result, they have found themselves often at loggerheads with big business. But let me focus on the first half, their supposed "acceptance of mergers and acquisitions." This generalization seems misleading at best and downright false at worst. Neoliberalism, after all, is not a monolithic actor but a diverse "thought collective" (to use one influential term). Neoliberalism is usually taken to encompass the Freiburg/Ordo school as well as the early (pre-Friedman) Chicago school. Most of the scholars associated with these schools were (at least initially) heavily critical towards monopolization tendencies in the market. Many neoliberals saw a case for "strong state" regulation in the service of breaking down monopolies to the extent that mergers and acquisitions threaten to create economic deadweight losses that undermine both market competition and consumer welfare. The German Ordoliberals, in particular, emphasized the importance of pro-competition agencies and antitrust legislation. As a result, a lot of the European Union competition law has Ordo roots. Of course, these antitrust laws could, themselves, be considered "authoritarian" according to the author's normative framework-but they were (and are) "authoritarian" (if that is the right word) in the name of protecting consumers and small businesses against big business and the danger of institutional capture. (It is another thing whether they have been successful in their efforts. I will leave that for others to decide.) The very idea of the "Competitive Order" that featured prominently in the discussions of the early Mont Pèlerin

Latin American Perspectives, 2019