By now, given the lively interest in the topic among scholars across multiple disciplines in the last 15 years or so, claiming to say anything new about neoliberalism might seem rather presumptuous. This book, nevertheless, endeavors to offer a new intellectual history of neoliberalism by arguing that, as an ideology, it is inextricably linked to the invention of a specific figure: the sovereign consumer. The book understands the neoliberal sovereign consumer not as a real individual or as a fixed concept but as a range of ideas asserting that free consumer choice is the defining feature of the market economy. Against this background, it argues that neoliberal thinkers invented the figure of the sovereign consumer in the interwar period and that the figure has been crucial to the ways in which neoliberals have constructed and legitimized their visions of modern society ever since. The sovereign consumer, so the book asserts, emerged and continues to function as the key actor in the neoliberal political paradigm.
In this focus, the ambition of the book is to offer a new and better understanding of the contemporary neoliberal paradigm by exploring how the figure of the sovereign consumer has been constructed, disseminated, and used for governing purposes in the Western world since the interwar era. It portrays how neoliberal thinkers created the idea that individuals should be understood as critical, independent, and ultimately sovereign consumers able to dictate economic production and drive political activity. Special attention is paid to the ways in which neoliberals conceptualized the sovereign consumer as an agent who guarantees not only economic efficiency but also democratic institutions wherein choosing between available âproductsâ became a central approach to political activity. This conceptualization, so the book argues, hinged on the idea of democracy as a method of choosing and is, accordingly, a re-invention of the market as the democratic forum par excellence. In other words, the book portrays neoliberalism as a new political economy of consumer choice that aims to marketize the political. Moreover, in association with this, the book demonstrates how the sovereign consumer emerged as a dominant actor in the paradigm of contemporary neoliberal politics as political institutions in the Western world began to govern their populations in ways that claimed to unleash and enhance the societal potential of this particular figure.
In writing the history of the sovereign consumer as the history of neoliberalism, the book illustrates the ways in which the sovereign consumer has, in different contexts, been assigned different meanings and has served many different purposes. More specifically, it demonstrates the ways in which West German neoliberals, American neoliberals, and Scandinavian neoliberals ascribed divergent degrees of sovereignty and rationality to the figure and held heterogeneous views concerning the appropriate role of the state in a consumer-driven economy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Additionally, the book goes beyond the confined realm of neoliberal actors and institutions by exploring how the mainstream discipline of economics and the political center-left contributed to the shaping and dissemination of the sovereign consumer after 1945.
Overall, the book argues that the idea of the sovereign consumer has functioned as a major driver in a wide-ranging transformation of political thinking since the 1960s that subordinates traditional political values to the narrower pursuit of economic ideals by decoupling visions of efficiency , utility, and growth from the promotion of rights, participation, and, finally and ironically, choice. In the process, this paradigm has gained prominence not only among neoliberals but across the political spectrum and especially among center-left politicians and intellectuals. It draws on a discourse stating that the sovereign consumer is harmed by state regulations and best protected by individual rationality and the efficiency of the market. Indeed, this paradigm shift pushes a new understanding of state institutions, markets, and individuals as well as of the desired relations between them. As such, it has also discredited and replaced traditional meanings of democracy that emphasize public deliberation and majority voting as the primary sources of legitimacy in political decision-making.
The book unfolds this argument in six chapters that include nation-specific, comparative, and transnational perspectives, illuminating different developmental paths as well as entanglements between North America, continental Europe, and Scandinavia.
Thereby, the chapters emphasize the local adaptions and negotiations of a figure that has been imbued with universalist claims concerning its applicability and superiority as a mode of societal order, regardless of particular national or regional contexts. Against this background, the book analyzes the invention of the sovereign consumer framed as a new intellectual history of neoliberalism and forms a better understanding of the current, and in many ways problematic, neoliberal political paradigm.
Defining Neoliberalism: Free Markets, New Liberalisms, and Sovereign Consumers
This book is intended to enter a well-established conversation . Indeed, the concept of neoliberalism has long been omnipresent in the political and academic vocabulary. It became widely used in the 1990s to explain the economic paradigm shift that has taken place in Great Britain and the United States and is often associated with two political figures: Margaret Thatcher, who became Prime Minister in 1979, and Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981. Their respective rises marked a significant shift in attitude. Whereas governments in the West had previously aimed to create full employment through government intervention in, and distribution of, the economy, new economic policies responding to the economic crisis of the 1970s and the so-called breakdown of Keynesianism sought to enhance the competitiveness of businesses through privatization , outsourcing, and deregulation. It was especially in response to these developments that critics began to speak of neoliberalism as a political ideology.1 Since the 2008 financial crisis, the term has become even more prominent in scholarly research as scholars across disciplines published a wealth of new writings that explore the nature and dynamics of neoliberalism, including its role in the recent transformations of financial markets.2
Scholars have offered various definitions of neoliberalism. The most famous book is David Harveyâs A Brief History of Neoliberalism, published in 2005, which constructs neoliberalism as a period stretching from the 1970s onwards in which ideas of market exchange became dominant in political thought and practice throughout the world.3 Harveyâs account understands neoliberalism in Marxist terms, as a deliberate political project aiming to restore the power of the capitalist class after years of decline in the post-war period. According to Harvey , neoliberal ideas legitimized political initiatives deemed necessary to achieve the capitalist resurgence led by national governments and international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Harvey mainly focused on economic and political shifts in the United States , Great Britain, and China in the wake of the economic and political crises of the 1970s. Still, he regards neoliberalism as a global transformation of the dynamics of class struggle, and a range of other Marxists have followed Harvey in portraying neoliberalism as the outcome of intended and planned structural changes in the global economy.4
But this is not the only interpretation. Building on Michel Foucaultâs concept of biopolitics, outlined in the late 1970s, a second strand of research has, instead, interpreted neoliberalism as a normative rationality that compels individuals to think and act according to principles of competition and economic calculation.5 Here the primary focus is on how human beings are encouraged to transform their private and social lives according to the ideals of entrepreneurship based on the model of the firm. Consequently, according to this perspective, neoliberalism is characterized by the disseminationâinto all social and cultural spheresâof a competition ethos aiming to transform us into âentrepreneurs of the self,â engaged in self-interested conduct as personal investment.6
Meanwhile, a third body of research analyzes neoliberalism less as an idea and more as a network of scholars, intellectuals, and businessmen who all had links to the Mont PĂšlerin Society, the transnational association of economists, intellectuals, and business leaders founded by the Austrian Ă©migrĂ© economist Friedrich Hayek in 1947 with the explicit aim of renewing liberalism. From its inception, this network was associated with a range of academic institutions, think tanks, and political partiesâall of which contributed to the global reshaping and diffusion of free market thought. To its critics, it represented a crucial station on the road to a so-called neoliberal âhegemony.â7
These are only the three core strands. Neoliberalism has been studied from many other angles and perspectives. However, many scholars, and some associated with the above approaches, use the concept rather unreflectively to criticize a range of highly diffuse societal developments placed under the umbrella of the concept. In reaction, other scholars have argued that the concept of neoliberalism has become too dilute, broad, and politically loaded to own any kind of analytical relevance.8
Accordingly, any reference to and use of neoliberalism as an analytical category demands a clear definition of the term. In this book, I proceed from a pragmatic, heuristic, and, arguably, unique definition. I understand neoliberalism simply as the ideological product of processes in which self-identified liberals, from the interwar period onwards, have attempted to renew liberalism as an ideology that claims to promote societal orders based on free markets and individual freedom . In other words, neoliberalism refers, in what follows, to efforts to construct new liberalisms. Thus, it suggests that we see neoliberalism as a heterogeneous and malleable set of market-oriented ideas advanced by liberal thinkers in different places and at different times.
That said, three institutional and discursive features unite the protagonists featured in...
