The Limits of Neoliberalism

Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition

William Davies

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526411594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Brilliant...explains how the rhetoric of competition has invaded almost every domain of our existence."
— Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here" "In this fascinating book Davies inverts the conventional neoliberal practice of treating politics as if it were mere epiphenomenon of market theory, demonstrating that their version of economics is far better understood as the pursuit of politics by other means."
— Professor Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame "A sparkling, original, and provocative analysis of neoliberalism. It offers a distinctive account of the diverse, sometimes contradictory, conventions and justifications that lend authority to the extension of the spirit of competitiveness to all spheres of social life…This book breaks new ground, offers new modes of critique, and points to post-neoliberal futures."
— Professor Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster Since its intellectual inception in the 1930s and its political emergence in the 1970s, neo-liberalism has sought to disenchant politics by replacing it with economics. This agenda-setting text examines the efforts and failures of economic experts to make government and public life amenable to measurement, and to re-model society and state in terms of competition. In particular, it explores the practical use of economic techniques and conventions by policy-makers, politicians, regulators and judges and how these practices are being adapted to the perceived failings of the neoliberal model. By picking apart the defining contradiction that arises from the conflation of economics and politics, this book asks: to what extent can economics provide government legitimacy? Now with a new preface from the author and a foreword by Aditya Chakrabortty.

1 The Disenchantment of Politics Neoliberalism, sovereignty and economics

Friedrich Von Hayek believed that the intellectual, political and organizational forces of liberalism began a downward trajectory around 1870 (Hayek, 1944: 21). In place of the decentralized structure of the Victorian marketplace and British classical economics, came trends towards bureaucratization, management and the protection of the ‘social’ realm, all accompanied by a growing authority for German institutionalist and historicist ideas. By the 1940s this had reached the point of emergency. Having witnessed a financial crisis usher in Fascism, Keynesianism and then a world war, Hayek viewed the choices of political modernity in starkly binary terms:

We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and “conscious” direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals. (1944: 21)

Reversing this trend would mean restoring the political authority of ‘impersonal’ and ‘anonymous’ mechanisms, and of ‘individual’ and ‘unconscious’ forces in public life, which lack any ‘deliberately chosen goals’. When Hayek looked back to the high period of British liberalism, what he mourned was a society that had no explicitly collective or public purpose, and whose direction could not be predicted or determined. The central function of markets in this nostalgic vision was to coordinate social activity without intervention by political authorities or ‘conscious’ cooperation by actors themselves. And if there were other ways of coordinating individuals’ unconscious goals, impersonally and anonymously, these might be equally welcome as markets. The virtue of markets, for Hayek, was their capacity to replace egalitarian and idealist concepts of the common good that he believed could lead to tyranny.

Hayek’s thought is widely recognized to have played a key role in inspiring and co-ordinating the intellectual and political movement which came to be known as ‘neoliberalism’ (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009; Stedman-Jones, 2012; Bergin, 2013). This movement achieved a number of significant political and policy victories from the late 1970s onwards, resulting in a roughly coherent paradigm that spread around the world over the subsequent thirty years. Its major crisis, if that is what it actually was, began in 2007, when it emerged that Western investment banks had drastically under-calculated the risks attached to the US housing market, the fall-out from which was a macro-economic stagnation more enduring than any since the 1880s. While the neoliberal policy era was punctuated by unusually frequent financial crises (Harvey, 2005), what was most significant about the 2007–09 banking crisis – in addition to its scale – was the fact that it originated in Wall Street, bringing vast fiscal and social costs to a nation that had played a key role in propagating neoliberal policies. But the fact that this policy paradigm appears largely intact, several years after the dawning of the financial crisis, is now an object of scholarly interest in its own right (Crouch, 2011; Engelen et al., 2011; Mirowski, 2013).

Running in parallel to this economic breakdown was a series of events that raised widespread moral concerns about the coherence of key public institutions and society more generally. Britain, for example, saw a succession of disturbances, apparently affected by forms of hedonistic self-interest: in 2009 Members of Parliament were discovered to be routinely lying about their expenses in order to inflate their pay; in 2011 journalists were discovered to be engaged in the criminal hacking of phones, possibly beknown to the police; in August 2011 disparate riots erupted across English cities, featuring seemingly hedonistic acts of destruction and the widespread looting of branded goods, with scarce collective or political grievance; and in 2012 it emerged that individuals working in major high street banks had conspired to alter the ‘LIBOR’ rate, which dictates the price at which banks lend to each other, and influences the rate at which banks will lend to customers, and questions were raised as to whether government officials had actively encouraged this. These unconnected events seem to suggest a normative and political crisis, whereby the very possibility of deliberate collective action is thrown into question. A form of institutionalized anti-institutionalism seemed to have become established. The routine nature of so much of this activity made it impossible to dismiss as mere ‘corruption’ or ‘criminality’. Meanwhile, concerns about the effects of ‘consumerism’, inequality and loneliness upon health and mental health (which in turn bring major economic costs) have begun to raise elite concerns about the sustainability of the contemporary political-economic model (Davies, 2011a). ‘Epidemics’ of depression, anxiety, obesity and addictive behaviour register as an indictment on societies that have made calculated self-interest and competitiveness tacitly constitutional principles (Davies, 2012).

The inability to achieve a new political settlement or new economic paradigm is by some measures a testimony to the success of the neoliberal project. Hayek’s complaint could now even be reversed: we have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced foreseen results and to replace the collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces towards deliberately chosen goals by the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market (or market-like behaviour). Having consciously opened ourselves up to spontaneous and uncertain processes, we are now unable to escape from them again. The powerlessness of political or moral authorities to shape or direct society differently demonstrates how far the neoliberal critique of economic planning has permeated. Whether Hayek would have still trusted ‘unconscious’ social forces, when confronted with the libidinous, destructive rush of contemporary consumerism and financialization, is another question. The framing of neoliberal crises – including financial crises – in psychological and neurological terms (discussed in Chapter 5) can be seen partly as a last ditch effort to distinguish which ‘unconscious’ forces are to be trusted and which ones are not.

Defining neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is clearly not a unified doctrine to the extent that Keynesianism is. While Hayek is one of the obvious figureheads of the neoliberal ‘thought collective’ (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009) his work is at odds with many other neoliberal forms of policy and governance. The origins of the neoliberal movement can be traced to the contributions of Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises to the ‘socialist calculation debate’ of the 1920s and 1930s (Mises, 1990; Hayek, 2009). The intellectual project of reinventing liberalism was scattered between London, New York, Chicago, Freiburg and Vienna, up until the 1970s (Peck, 2010). The application and adaptation of these ideas spread no less haphazardly, serving various masters as they went. But what, I suggest, is the common thread in all of this – and what makes the term ‘neoliberalism’ a necessary one – is an attempt to replace political judgement with economic evaluation, including, but not exclusively, the evaluations offered by markets. Of course, both political and economic logics are plural and heterogeneous. But the central defining characteristic of all neoliberal critique is its hostility to the ambiguity of political discourse, and a commitment to the explicitness and transparency of quantitative, economic indicators, of which the market price system is the model. Neoliberalism is the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics.

The language of politics, unlike the language of economics, has a self-consciously performative dimension. It is used with a public in mind, and an awareness that the members and perspectives contained in that public are plural and uncertain. The praxis and aesthetics of discourse are acknowledged in what we consider to be ‘political’ situations. These include legal process, in which text and speech resonate in public settings, and seek to do something as much as represent something. This doesn’t mean that economics as a discipline is not performative, requires no public or has no praxis. On the contrary, a great deal of recent scholarship has demonstrated that economics is often powerfully performative (Callon, 1998; Mitchell, 2002; MacKenzie, 2006; MacKenzie et al., 2007) and employs political rhetorics (McCloskey, 1985). Quantification and measurement have their own affective and aesthetic qualities (Porter, 1995), but the example of market price indicates to an economic sensibility that ambiguity and performativity can be beneficially minimized or constrained. From a neoliberal perspective, price provides a logical and phenomenological ideal of how human relations can be mediated without the need for rhetorical, ritualized or deliberately performative modes of communication. Indeed, price may even suggest that peaceful human interaction is feasible without speech at all. The reduction of complex and uncertain situations to a single number, as achieved by a market, appears as a route out of the hermeneutic pluralism and associated dangers of politics. Whether generated by markets or by economics, a price is an example of what Poovey terms the ‘modern fact’, a simple ‘preinterpretive’ or ‘noninterpretive’ representation of a state of affairs (Poovey, 1998).

If today politics and public institutions appear to have disintegrated into merely calculated and strategic behaviour, one response would be to view this as a side-effect of ‘modernity’ or ‘advanced capitalism’ or plain ‘greed’. But perhaps a more fruitful one would be to examine this as a self-conscious project of rationalization on the part of intellectuals and policy elites. The disenchantment of politics by economics involves a deconstruction of the language of the ‘common good’ or the ‘public’, which is accused of a potentially dangerous mysticism. In the first instance, as manifest in the work of Mises and Hayek, this is an attack on socialism and the types of state expertise that enact it, but it is equally apparent in a critique of the liberal idea of justice, as in the work of Richard Posner and others. With some reservations, it is also manifest as a critique of executive political authority which is contrasted unfavourably with the economically rational authority of the manager. The targets of neoliberal critique are institutionally and ontologically various, which elicits different styles of critique. In each case, substantive claims about political authority and the public are critically dismantled and replaced with technical economic substitutes. These substitutes may need to be invented from scratch, hence the constructivist and often experimental dimensions of neoliberalism, a selection of which will be explored in detail in subsequent chapters.

As the more observant critics of neoliberalism have noted, it did not, therefore, seek or achieve a shrinking of the state, but a re-imagining and transformation of it (Peck, 2010; Mirowski, 2013). In the seventy years separating the golden age of Victorian liberalism and the intellectual birth of neoliberalism, the character of the state and of capitalism had changed markedly. The rise of American and German industrial capitalism had been achieved thanks to new economies of scale and organizational efficiencies associated with large corporations and hierarchical structures, including the birth of management (Chandler, 1977; Arrighi, 2009). Science and expertise were now formally channelled into business. Technical advancements in the fields of statistics and national accounts, followed by the birth of macroeconomics in the 1930s, meant that ‘the economy’ had appeared as a complex object of political management (Mitchell, 1998; Suzuki, 2003). And the on-going growth of a ‘social’ realm, measured and governed by sociology, social statistics, social policy and professions, meant that the American and European states of the 1930s had far more extensive capacities and responsibilities for audit and intervention than the British liberal state of the 1860s (Donzelot, 1991; Desrosieres, 1998).

The pragmatism of the neoliberal pioneers prevented them from proposing a romantic return to a halcyon age of classical liberalism, instead committing them to a reinvention of liberalism suitable for a more complex, regulated, Fordist capitalism. Hayek believed that ‘the fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion, is capable of an infinite variety of applications’ (1944: 17). Victorian laissez-faire was only one empirical manifestation of the liberal idea. Restoring economic freedom would not be achieved simply through withdrawing the state from ‘the market’, but through active policy interventions, to remould institutions, state agencies and individuals, in ways that were compatible with a market ethos (however defined) and were amenable to economic measurement. The state is therefore a powerful instrument of neoliberalism, though also an object of its constant critique; this is one of many contradictions of neoliberalism, and one which has been raised to new heights since the banking crises of 2007–09.

Hayek’s own interpretations of both liberalism and the political public sphere were highly idiosyncratic. Liberalism is associated primarily with the uncertainty of outcomes. Freedom, by this account, requires ignorance of the future, and the preservation of freedom requires a dogmatic agnosticism on the part of public institutions.¹ By contrast, political activity is interpreted as a project of determining outcomes and reducing uncertainty. At least in the modern era, politics is viewed as an instrument of planning and the pursuit of certainty, though this is concealed by the deceptive nature of political language. This pessimistic view directly inverts the (equally pessimistic) perspective of Hannah Arendt, for example, who saw liberal governance of the economic and ‘social’ realm as a poor, expertly managed substitute for the inherent uncertainty and vitality of political action (Arendt, 1958). Both positions celebrate, and arguably romanticize, uncertainty, but see its rationalist enemies in different places – the Hayekian neoliberal fears the politician, while the Arendtian political actor fears the economist.

Most analyses of neoliberalism have focused on its commitment to ‘free’ markets, deregulation and trade. I shan’t discuss the validity of these portrayals here, although some have undoubtedly exaggerated the similarities between ‘classical’ nineteenth-century liberalism and twentieth-century neoliberalism. The topic addressed here is a different one – the character of neoliberal authority: on what basis does the neoliberal state demand the right to be obeyed, if not on substantive political grounds? To a large extent, it is on the basis of particular economic claims and rationalities, constructed and propagated by economic experts. The state does not necessarily (or at least, not always) cede power to markets, but comes to justify its decisions, policies and rules in terms that are commensurable with the logic of markets. Neoliberalism might therefore be defined as the elevation of market-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms (Davies, 2013: 37). The authority of the neoliberal state is heavily dependent on the authority of economics (and economists) to dictate legitimate courses of action. Understanding that authority – and its present crisis – requires us to look at economics, economic policy experts and advisors as critical components of state institutions.

Max Weber argued that modernity disenchants the world through positivist science and bureaucratization, subsuming the particular within the universal, reducing qualities to quantities. In Weber’s analysis, modern science and bureaucracy lack any ‘outward’ or public sense of their own intrinsic value to humanity, making them cold, impersonal and anonymous forces – those same characteristics of markets that Hayek deemed valuable (Weber, 1991a, 1991b). Both the scientist and the bureaucrat run the risk of nihilism, but counter this through holding on to private, ‘inward’ vocations which condition and sustain their practices of empty rationalization. In this respect, ‘disenchantment’ can never be complete, as it depends for its progress on unspoken ethical commitments on the parts of those who propagate it. To some extent these ethical commitments must be shared, if rationalist depictions of the world are to hold together as a consensually shared reality. This becomes self-evident where the question of scientific and social scientific ‘methodology’ arises. In order for objective representations to be generated, certain presuppositions and practical procedures must be adhered to that have a normatively binding force. The stronger the claim to value neutrality, the more rigidly these presuppositions and procedures must bind, so, for example, neo-classical economists are bound by far tighter rules of conduct than social anthropologists. Paradoxically, therefore, value neutrality is an ethos in its own right (Du Gay, 2000), and efforts to eradicate all values are ultimately as dangerous to rationalization as they are to ethics, as Nietzsche recognized.

What is distinctive about neoliberalism as a mode of thought and government, however, is its acute desire to invert the relationship between technical rationality and substantive ethos. Where Weber saw modern rationalization and capitalism as dependent on certain ethical precepts, Hayek and his followers believed that various technical forms of quantitative evaluation could provide the conditions and guarantee of liberal values. This technocratic turn diverts the attention of the liberal away from moral or political philosophy and towards more mundane technical and pragmatic concerns. Prosaic market institutions and calculative devices become the harbinger of unspoken liberal commitments. This style of political reasoning survives, for example, in Thomas Friedman’s ‘golden arches theory of conflict prevention’, which observes that no two nations possessing a McDonalds’ outlet within their borders have ever gone to war with each other: the Kantian liberal ideal of ‘perpetual peace’ comes to be pursued via the mundane technologies of hamburger production (Friedman, 2000).

This offers one route to understanding the contradictory nature of neoliberal authority. Whether in the work of the Chicago School of economics, the ‘New Public Management’ and ‘shareholder value’ movements of the 1980s or the ‘national competitiveness’ evaluations that framed policy debates in the 1990s, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate normative judgement from public life to the greatest possible extent. In the tradition of Jeremy Bentham, intrinsic values are to be replaced by extrinsic valuation (i.e. measurement). Converting qualities into quantities removes ambiguity, emptying politics of its misunderstandings and ethical controversies, over which, Milton Friedman believed, ‘men can ultimately only fight’ (Friedman, 1953). Just as Bentham reduced all forms of experience to different quantities of utility, Friedman and his colleagues reduced all values, tastes, beliefs and political ideals to the status of ‘preferences’, eliminating the distinction between a moral stance and a desire. In this respect, they shared the anti-metaphysical ethos of behaviourism which permeated much of American social science over the first half of the twentieth century (Mills, 1998). Neoliberalism has been an acutely modernizing force, in the Weberian sense of rationalization.

But this form of rationalization, this disenchantment of politics by economics still rests on certain vocational commitments and intrinsic notions of the common good, albe...