Handbook of Neoliberalism

Simon Springer, Kean Birch, Julie MacLeavy, Simon Springer, Kean Birch, Julie MacLeavy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317549659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses toemerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved.

The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. With contributions from over 50 leading
authors working at institutions around the world the volumes seven sections will offer a systematic overview of neoliberalism's origins, political implications, social tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and aftermaths in addressing ongoing and emerging debates.

The volume aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of the field and to advance the established and emergent debates in a field that has grown exponentially over the past two decades, coinciding with the meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form, policy and program, and governmentality. It includes a substantive introductory chapter and will serve as an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professional scholars alike.

PART I

Origins

1

HISTORICIZING THE NEOLIBERAL SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

Matthew Eagleton-Pierce

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 problematize and analyse 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, financialization, and general moves towards ‘market-based’ modes of regulation or governmentality being major debates in the literature (Harvey 2005; Brenner et al. 2010; Peck et al. 2012; Springer 2010, 2012). While accepting this temporal frame as a starting point, the chapter seeks to contextualize 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 recognized, 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.

The spirit of capitalism

The justifications advanced for the maintenance of the capitalist system can often appear unconvincing, fragile, or even absurd. From the nineteenth century, with its growth of industrial organization, capitalism has been shadowed by different forms of critique. Some of the most common reasons given for opposition against capitalism have included arguments that the system fosters inequalities in material wealth, oligopolistic market structures, excessively close relations between political and commercial elites, and dehumanizing social effects. Within this complex history, across many institutional settings, people are yoked into commercial pursuits that can be mundane, distasteful, or even dangerous to their health. Most workers are confronted with limited options throughout their lives: with respect to accessing labour markets, the reliability of paid employment, and the basic activities of the working day. Even where forms of social security have been politically constructed, such as in developed societies since the Second World War, a large population is only two or three pay cheques away from poverty, if they do not already experience such conditions. For capitalists and managers, a class fraction who have power over the means of production, enhanced positions of relative security are cultivated. Yet even among these groups, life is often marked by an anxious and seemingly insatiable struggle for competitive advantage, of which luxury consumption represents one major avenue for social distinction.

Despite these tendencies, the capacity for capitalism to renew itself in the face of tensions, crises, and contradictions has surprised many of its most prominent supporters and detractors. To survive and reconfigure, capitalism requires reasons for encouraging people to commit to particular accumulation processes. The degree to which this commitment is accepted varies, not only across time and territories, but also with respect to the moral values of each participant. Commitment could range from the zealous embrace of business promoted by management gurus, through to moderate levels of contentment and, at the other end of the spectrum, a quiet frustration or resignation that refrains from spilling over into outright hostility against the prevailing order. Remuneration is one tool for ensuring commitment, but is often insufficient on it own. Thus, many critical writers have been preoccupied with trying to understand how certain social mechanisms contribute to the justification of capitalist practices. For instance, in the Marxist tradition, ideology has occupied a major conceptual space, often depicted as an elite-led ‘cloaking’ instrument that aims to secure the legitimation of business. From this viewpoint, the emphasis is placed on how methods of legitimation are used by capitalists and state officials to maintain particular social relations and how conflict is reduced or ‘masked’ through seemingly consensual means (Marx and Engels 1970; Gramsci 1971; for an introduction to ideological analysis, see Freeden 1996). Elsewhere, in a similar way, Pierre Bourdieu (1991, 2005) devised the notion of symbolic power to explore how the naturalization of authority, including economic agendas, can become sedimented into the mental frameworks of both dominant and dominated agents (see Springer this volume).

The conceptual framing of this chapter stems from these long-standing scholarly enquiries into the necessity of capitalism to justify itself to different audiences. A specific inspiration here comes from Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007), a book which dissects a range of French management texts in order to elucidate the processes through which neoliberalism, conceived as the current stage of capitalism, has sustained itself through the selective alteration of critiques derived from the 1960s and 1970s (also see Chiapello 2003; Boltanski and Chiapello 2007; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). By referencing ‘spirit’, Boltanski and Chiapello follow the classic proposition from Max Weber (2001[1930]: 17) that capitalism has fostered a ‘peculiar ethic’, one that is ‘not mere business astuteness’, but a broader ‘ethos’ or ‘duty’ around the ambition of unlimited capital accumulation. Boltanski and Chiapello invoke ideology as a way to study the changing properties of this spirit, but their definition departs from the frequently perceived reductionist Marxist sense of the ‘dominant ideology’, a presumed coherent ‘regime’ engineered by Machiavellian elites in order to conceal material interests. Rather, they draw attention to the practical, everyday making and consumption of ideology beyond the world of elites. In other words, following Paul Ricoeur (1986), Boltanski and Chiapello try to offer a broader ‘culturalist’ perspective, one which is attuned to how ideology performs not only a distorting and legitimating function, but is also directed towards the social integration and organization of populations.

What does the concept of the spirit of capitalism offer to the study of neoliberalism? Three possibilities can be suggested. First, by foregrounding capitalism as the larger object of analysis, it helps to situate historically phenomena associated with neoliberalism and, therefore, guard against any propensity to reify or exaggerate recent events since the 1970s as being necessarily ‘unique’ or ‘distinctive’. Even worse is the general predilection seen in some scholarly agendas to gravitate towards claiming the ‘new’ in order to attract attention, even if such labels may not in themselves have merit. The spotlight on capitalist practices also sharpens the analytical optic on political economy, with its attendant links to questions of distribution, a focus not always seen in the wider literature on neoliberalism which sidelines the master concept of capitalism (on the reasons for the academic and popular decline in the use of the term ‘capitalism’, see Eagleton-Pierce 2016). Second, through this attention to history, one can better grasp how the neoliberal spirit both incorporates and rejects other ideological properties from earlier periods of capitalism. This benefit is often overlooked and is worthy of investigation, particularly for explaining the relative ‘stability’ of theories, narratives, and agendas that are claimed to carry a neoliberal stamp. Thus, how a neoliberal viewpoint resonates as ‘coherent’ – that is, treated as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ – can often be explained through tracing the genealogy of such opinions through a longer liberal tradition. Third, the focus on the looser category of ideological spirit also helps to relax certain presumptions on what ideas filter in and out of neoliberal justificatory schemas. In other words, my argument is that the potency of neoliberalism rests not simply on ‘scientific’ theories, notably neoclassical economics, but also on a range of commonly held norms, ethical values, and aspirations that become integrated into a neoliberal cosmos. Indeed, the variety of these types of justification – composed for different audiences with specific vocabularies, customs, and rules, yet still capitalist in orientation – is precisely what helps to give practices tied to neoliberalism a hegemonic-like appearance.

Three themes in the liberal tradition

Like a prism that refracts light into different wavelengths, the study and practice of liberalism has spawned a rich variety of forms. The complexity of this history – which spans socialist to conservative theories, nationally specific mutations and ruptures, and many different societal applications – resists easy summation. A single unchanging essence of liberalism cannot be captured and pinned down. At the same time, there is no attempt here to offer an exhaustive survey of all the potential properties within the neoliberal spirit of capitalism. Rather, the discussion highlights some enduring themes within the history of liberal thought which, in turn, have been rediscovered in neoliberal revisions and articulations. Following John Gray (1995), these family resemblances help to grant liberalism the quality of a ‘tradition’ – that is, a patterned or inherited way of thinking. Three themes are examined: (1) individualism, whereby the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective; (2) universalism, such as seen in the expansionary moves towards a world market; and (3) meliorism, whereby humans, it is claimed, have the potential to improve and remake themselves. Gray (ibid.) also examines the theme of egalitarianism, but that is not explicitly debated here. The discussion therefore seeks to selectively contextualize how such themes – often read as emblematic of contemporary neoliberalism – should be situated in relation to a longer incorporated history of social struggles.

Individualism

Prior to the eighteenth century, the modern notion of seeing oneself as ‘an individual’, a person endowed with a distinctive set of qualities, was probably not a common conception. Obligation to family, religion, empire, or king often superseded any claims to individual subjectivity. From the eighteenth century, classical liberal writers began to construct an argument around the individual as a moral figure. This line of reasoning did not necessarily deny the significance of collectives – such as the state, society, or community – but, rather, sought to promote the abstract individual as a normative baseline. Thus, in Adam Smith’s writing, commercial society was defined as the aggregate of individual decisions, although Smith was particularly interested in the emotional content of such actions (such as empathy, sloth, indulgence etc.) (Smith 1776[1993]). From the late nineteenth century, in a departure from this latter appeal to emotions, neoclassical economists redefined the concept of the individual. The neoclassical theorization of the individual suggested that only human beings are ‘real’ and can be measured. In terms of its disciplinary and political impact, this formulation has generated profound consequences. Social entities and institutions still matter for neoclassical economics, but such forms can only be explained in relation to the beliefs and choices of individuals (Hausman and McPherson 2008). In turn, this principle often slips comfortably into a second feature: the individual as a character driven by private tastes who, significantly, acts as a ‘rational’ decision-maker in crafting choices. The ideal individual surfaces here as a calculating animal who is or, more prescriptively, should be, attentive to his or her material efficiency (Robbins 1935; also see Jevons 1875; for a critique, see Davis 2003).

Inspired in part by the Romantic movement, the idea of individualism takes off in the nineteenth century. As charted by Lukes (1973), individualism has an elaborate semantic history with a range of meanings informed by national contexts. In the USA, for instance, it became ‘a symbolic catchword of immense ideological significance, expressing all that has at various times been implied in the philosophy of natural rights, the belief in free enterprise, and the American Dream’ (ibid.: 26). By contrast, in France in particular, but also elsewhere, individualism has carried a pejorative tone, with the implication that to become too focused on the individual jeopardizes the presumed higher interests of society. This latter connotation has, therefore, made individualism a useful concept for critics of capitalism, as illustrated by Marx’s argument that individuals are not born free and rational, but struggle to make their own history ‘under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1852[2000]: 329). Thus, since the notion of individualism is mobilized both in defence and opposition to capitalism, it is not surprising that the term has become a point of struggle. For instance, Friedrich Hayek (1948), often considered an early neoliberal thinker, argued for a ‘true’ theory of individualism, one which set its face against socialist approaches to society, but at the same time did not treat individuals as either isolated or infallible beings removed from larger forces (see also Stedman Jones 2012). In sum, by the mid-twentieth century, prior to the mainstream adoption of policy-making linked to neoliberalism, the idea of individualism was already diffused into everyday discourse.

How, therefore, has the notion of individualism been recast in relation to the neoliberal spirit of capitalism? Among many illustrations, developments in consumerism can be noted. In advertising, the nurturing of the self, through the purchase of commodities, is frequently offered as being both desirable and necessary. The neoliberal twist on ‘individual’ is distinctive in at least two ways. First, the category of the ‘consumer’ has now extended into other fields, such as politics, education, and health. While ‘consumer’ has always carried an unfavourable tone, initially meaning to destroy and to waste, one could argue that the popularization of the term beyond purely commercial settings is helping to neutralize this criticism. Second, with the valorization of choice and competitiveness as guiding principles for societal organization, the appeal to personalization and customization offers further extensions of neoliberal thinking. From the late 1980s, these latter expressions became concerns for many businesses, with marketing theory helping to craft, and implement, such agendas. The rise of ‘mass customization’ systems was made financially viable by new flexible manufacturing processes, such as seen in the automotive industry (Davis 1989; Kotler 1989; Alford et al. 2000). In this sense, therefore, the marketing of individualized choice to larger populations – a visible phenomenon by the turn of the century – required the develop...