Critique in a Neoliberal Age

Pauline Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032083254
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317052951
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Critique in a Neoliberal Age brings a critique of ideology to main debates within economic sociology, populism studies, the neoliberal university, therapy culture, contemporary intimacies and feminism. Over the last decades, neoliberalism has worked to lift social protections and political regulations from the market and to identify modernity with capitalism itself. It has also engaged in an ideological project to screen alternative measurements of progress. Liberal and social democracy have been effectively disabled as grounds for weighing the costs of neoliberal predations. This volume examines the strategies through which neoliberalism has reconstituted and de-politicized liberal precepts such as universal justice, private right and a social democratic project responsive to needs. As such it will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social and critical theory, political and social philosophy, politics, cultural studies and feminist thought.

1 Critique as ideology critique in a neoliberal age

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 ‘didn’t change much of anything’ (Mirowski, 2013, p. 1) and this should have been the proof that the pudding was not just held together by a bold pragmatism. There were also clues about neoliberalism’s ideological agendas from some commentaries on neoliberal histories in Latin America. Enquiries into ‘post-neoliberal activism’ in the Global South found that popular resistances have sometimes re-enacted features of neoliberal political rationality that they failed to adequately address. Emir Sader makes the point that the revolts against neoliberalism can inhabit the limited ideological space for collective self-representation that have been cleared by neoliberal attacks on democratic political life and its formal institutions. These performative rebellions have not undertaken to rebuild the relations between democratic institutions and agenda-setting civil societies (2008). The question of how neoliberalism reproduces its political rationality and their required political forms need to be investigated.

Adam Kotsko is not convinced, though, that an enquiry into the strategies through which neoliberalism sustains and reproduces itself as ‘a discourse that aims to shape the world’ is appropriately diagnosed as an ideology. Kotsko is right that we don’t get much from a Marxist theory of ideology that ‘in its most simplistic form’ reduces ideology to an illusion that is ‘a secondary effect of the development of the economic mode of production’ and is to be ‘replaced by the true view of things, namely Marxist science’ (2018, p. 7). There is nothing to be gained by an attempt to resuscitate the old Althusserian ‘epistemological break’ between ideologies and science. The vision of a pitched battle between science as a universalizing, fully self-transparent, cultural form that looms over and threatens to oust self-blind, accommodating ideological behaviours and mindsets is not to be revived. The philosophical laboratory must not be caught advancing the cause of authoritarian politics. By now, some version of critique has already been worked into the temper of the neoliberal world with society-wide dissatisfactions, disappointments and deeply felt betrayals, losses and damages mounting up. Ideology critique assumes a place here in excavating how ideologies work to block our capacity to reflect upon and elaborate the alternative measures of our historical development that are being thrown up. In doing so, ideology critique might make some practical claim to contribute to rationalizing, and even energizing, our critical impulses.

To explore how we might open up neoliberalism to ideology critique, it is first necessary to identify the tasks of ideology critique in general terms. To do this, I will turn to an old classic. Published in 1937, Max Horkheimer’s essay on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ distinguishes a critical from an only sociological reception of ‘ideology’ by the interest of the former in measuring historical development against the needs and struggles of ‘real human beings’ (1972). This sets the challenge for an attempted rehabilitation of ‘ideology critique’ that must find a way of giving normative force to its blocked humanistic grounds without buying into a discredited philosophy of history and its authoritarian semantics.

The second section of this chapter finds that Wolfgang Streeck’s diagnosis of the rise of neoliberalism against the background of a blocked, not well-self-understood, social democratic project has some important clues in this regard (2014 and 2016). For Streeck, social democracy straddles two radically opposed diagnoses of the meaning of justice in capitalist democracies. His point is not that social democracy should take charge of the ideals of social justice and leave market justice to the neoliberals. Rather, the former is to be distinguished by its new recognition of the fraught divide between these ideals of justice and is called upon to challenge the distortions of neoliberalism’s bid to fuse them. We turn next to aspects of Michel Foucault’s prescient account of neoliberalism’s early efforts to fundamentally redesign and take over the normative space cleared by social democratic attempts to redress the limits of political liberalism. This turned out to have been neoliberalism’s ideological tour de force (of sorts) that effectively blunted and confused the self-understanding of a social democratic project. At the same time, Foucault’s own ambivalence towards neoliberalism guides us to where we might dig to uncover the normative grounds to be reoccupied by ideology critique. Drawn to neoliberalism as anti-humanism, Foucault incidentally betrays that a social democratic project needs to rethink itself as a democratized and historicized affirmation of a humanist tradition if it is to break through neoliberalism’s ideological blockade and offer itself as an alternative measure of our progress.

The final section of this chapter turns to György Markus’s critical appreciation of the idea of ideology critique that is found in Marx. This is a refinement of indications about the tasks of ideology critique already identified by Horkheimer. I will harness this clarification to some insights into the ideological battle between neoliberalism and a social democratic project to demonstrate the contributions that the latter can make as the grounds of ideology critique in a neoliberal age.

Critique as ideology critique

Outlined in several major essays written in the mid-1930s (1972 and 1993), Horkheimer’s classical account of ideology critique distinguishes its diagnosis of systemic distortions concerning historical development from an immanently critical search for blind spots, contradictions and oversights. For critical theory’s purpose ‘is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better functioning of any element in the structure’. On the contrary, the critical attitude is deeply suspicious of those categories of the ‘better, useful, appropriate, productive and valuable’ that turn out to be dictated by idealized rules of conduct that sustain ‘the blind interaction of individual activities’. Critical theory wants to restore the self-insight of concrete social beings into their historical being and into their agency. The veil of a ‘second nature’ is to be ripped aside to allow us to recognize

the present form of economy and the whole culture which it generates [as] the product of human work.... [T]hese men [are to] identify themselves with this totality and conceive it as will and reason. It is their own world.

Critical theory delivers a total change in how the world might be experienced. A lifetime of oppression, exploitation and war stands exposed as something alien and hostile to our humanity. It is a world that is modelled on ‘nonhuman natural processes’, on pure mechanisms. ‘That world is not their own but the world of capital’ (1972, pp. 207–8).

However, critical theory does not just turn on the opposition between a yet-to-be-made future that would objectify a new self-consciousness of our species capacity to humanize, and so assume responsibility for, the world versus an alienated present that is experienced as ‘a form of deadened existence’ inside ‘a naturally developing organism’ (1972, p. 208). Refusing to spin out from utopian abstractions, whose ‘truthfulness’ only amounts to their offer to help us cope with unchosen forms of existence, critical theory insists on breaking out of the ‘self-enclosed realm within society’ that is allocated to theory. It wants to lend its totalizing perspective to all those concrete activities that already betray an incipient, fragmentary consciousness that this is ‘our world’ and it needs to be made fit for us to live in (1972, pp. 242–3).

In 1937, Horkheimer felt that he might still plausibly appeal to a Marxist philosophy of history and to a weakened investment in the unfolding self-consciousness of the proletariat concerning its imputed historical mission. The ‘accusatory meaning’ that clings to this rendering of ideological thinking recalls Marx’s interest in clarifying the historical trajectory of ‘the raw power struggles of real human beings’ against the ‘mystifying cloak of ideology’ that is bent upon naturalizing the present (Horkheimer, 1993, p. 143 and p. 149). However, once the web of these undergirding faiths is severed by socialism’s defeats and bitter self-betrayals, critical theory risks reducing its role to oversighting a static epistemological opposition between a posited truth of history that is denied, held ransom to, a mystified, alienated immediacy. For a densely opaque age that is, more or less, reconciled to its own structural complexities and has, in the main, grasped pluralism as a core value, a teleological construction of history as progress has lost any easy cultural resonance. As Horkheimer was to increasingly appreciate, the presumption of a living dialectic between theoretical reflection provided by Marxism and the immediacy of the struggles of the age could not survive the sociological realities of the late twentieth century.

Perhaps, though, there are some remainders to Horkheimer’s early, no longer fully persuasive, iteration of the tasks and the cultural resources of critical theory that might offer guidance to ideology critique in the neoliberal age. Robin Celikates is persuaded that critical theory still needs to configure itself as a critique of ideology. He hopes to retrieve the core purposes of ideology critique as the exposure of the efficacy of ideological thinking in hindering ‘the use of critical and judgmental capacities in social practices’. Ideologies are charged with blocking ‘the transformation of capacities into abilities’ and preventing ‘the realization of one’s self-understanding as a judging and acting subject’ (2006, p. 35). For Celikates, the critique of ideology ‘makes agency possible by criticizing social arrangements, practices and self-understandings that have an inhibitory rather than enabling effect’ (2006, p. 36). There is not much here that remains recognizable from Horkheimer’s Marxist account of the tasks of critical theory. Reducing critique to an epistemology that facilitates an abstract will to power and essentially unrationalized action, Celikates does not demonstrate how critical theory might claim responsiveness to the distinctly progressive struggles of the day. In particular, this proposed revival of ideology critique misses Horkheimer’s central demarcation between an enabling of the ‘better functioning’ of existing structures and wants and critical theory’s investment in measuring existing arrangements against their fitness to our humanity.

A retrieval of ideology critique needs to scope itself in the broad terms that were laid down in Horkheimer’s objections to Karl Mannheim’s sociological theory of ideology (1993). Horkheimer insisted that Mannheim’s diagnosis of ideological thinking, as a dogmatic blockage of rival ways of representing our cultural potentials, suggests an only weak critical power. Something more is required of the discriminating, judgemental purposes of ideology critique. For us, this ‘more’ cannot be the rehabilitation of Marx’s philosophical critique of the present from the standpoint of history’s imputed progress towards overcoming alienation. Nonetheless, a critical appropriation of ideology critique today cannot just limit itself to challenging dogmatic closures against alternative world views. A case needs to be made for why this suppressed normativity needs to be rehabilitated, perhaps reinterpreted, and rationally chosen as our best historical potentials.

We begin to reveal neoliberalism as an ideological project as we reflect upon its concerted and sustained intentions to close down, not merely the social democratic institutions of the post-war period, but the, only half self-understood, utopian idealizations that underwrote these initiatives as well. Honneth tells us that the neoliberal revolution slammed on the brakes against the ‘normative progress’ of a social democratic politics that introduced claims about needs, not just private rights, into modern politics (2012, pp. 172–3). Certainly, critique needs to be able to identify cultural and political losses. However, for critique to raise what has been lost as a measure against the imperatives organizing the present, it must also seek to retrieve what always remained out of reach to imperfect representations of now blocked cultural potentials. Ideology critique in the neoliberal age cannot simply appeal to a complacent social democratic project that has made no effort to rethink itself. After all, social democracy was not able to offer a robust self-defence and has so far not been able to fully disentangle itself from a web of perverse neoliberal representations about the options for post-liberal societies. As Horkheimer insists, ideology critique raises suppressed cultural potentials as an ‘accusation’ against their ideological blockages and we need to rethink how social democratic normativity might rise to the challenge.

Market justice and social justice: drawing the battle lines

Stuart Hall observes that neoliberalism is a concept that ‘lumps too many things together’ and in doing so it sacrifices insight into its own internal complexity and geo-historical specificity. Giving up on the quest for conceptual clarity, he elects to use ‘neoliberalism’ as politically necessary in order ‘to give resistance content, focus and cutting edge’ (2011, p. 2). When Hall does fill in some distinctive features of a neoliberal world view, he finds that it is grounded in ‘the free possessive individual’ and that it casts that state as ‘tyrannical and oppressive’ (2011, p. 2). Having decried the concept for its indeterminacy, Hall proceeds to scope its meaning in terms that are essentially indistinguishable from the old political liberalism.

In order to grasp the specificity and the internal complexity of neoliberalism, Streeck brings it into view as political project that intends closing down a competing social democratic response to structural problems of democratic capitalism. His pointed question ‘[h]ow will capitalism end?’ is pitched from a diagnosis of a contest between two rival criteria of justice in which the acknowledgement of their incompatibility has emerged as the stakes. Streeck’s account of the tasks that confront a repositioning of the social democratic project as the grounds for a critique of neoliberalism has some advantages. In the first place, it offers sociological insight into why this project had failed to rise to the challenge and decisively take on the neoliberal ‘no choice, no costs’ advocacy of the reduction of social justice to market justice.

Streeck is persuaded that the economic boom of the immediate post-war years set the conditions for a lazy appreciation of the challenges that were facing capitalist democracies. Unprecedented economic growth masked the structural tensions between capital, driven by the imperatives of limitless accumulation, and the demands of a newly politicized labour force for expanded welfare states, free collective bargaining and a political guarantee of full employment. Struggling with competing imperatives, governments were provided with additional goods and services by which to defuse and mask class antagonisms (Streeck, 2016, p. 79). Jürgen Habermas makes a similar point. With a considerable portion of the domestic product at their disposal, the regulatory states of the post-war period were able to apply growth measures on the one side and social policies on the other to simultaneously stimulate the economy and guarantee social integration (2001, p. 50). This happy coincidence would not last and the economic supports of confidence in limitless collective progress began to disintegrate as uninterrupted growth petered out. The consensus that regulatory institutions could restrain the advance of capitalism, saving it from debilitating crises and extracting concessions for citizens, began to fall apart during the 1970s. From that time, governments under economic capitalism came under pressure to cease accommodating redistributive wage settlements and to restore monetary discipline (Streeck, 2016, p. 79). A raft of economic measures, including tolerance for inflation and public debt and the deregulation of private credit, failed to artificially reproduce the relatively easy accommodations of the post-war years. These were only ever a bid to ‘buy time’ against the economic and social disorder that would be the automatic setting yielded by the fundamental contradictions that were pulling democratic capitalism apart (Streeck, 2014).

Axel Honneth observes that the conviction that limitless growth and unstoppable energies would resource a new, politically demanding, ideal of justice, as the rational arbitration of a multiplicity of need claims upon public goods, came under stress from ‘a whole bundle of factors’ (2014, p. 245). However, a key difference between this and Streeck’s version of the winding back of social democratic reforms makes itself felt as distinct understandings of the normative grounds of ideology critique in the neoliberal age. Honneth’s ‘bundle of factors’ that produced the turn included the ‘gradual autonomization of the imperatives of the financial and capital markets’ and the deregulation of the labour market, ‘making part-time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Critique as ideology critique in a neoliberal age
• 2 Sociology and critique
• 3 The dialectic of critique and progress: Comparing Peter Wagner and Theodor Adorno
• 4 The embedded market and ideology critique
• 5 Common cause? The political rationalities of populism and neoliberalism
• 6 De-politicizing needs: Therapy culture and the ‘happiness turn’
• 7 The rationality potentials of intimacy: In search of a critical pulse
• 8 The critic’s role: Debating Nancy Fraser’s feminism
• 9 Learning from the Budapest School women: The politics of need interpretation
• 10 Conclusion
• Index