Learning from Carl Schmitt
Perhaps the greatest incongruity of the Neoliberal Thought Collective has been that the avatars of freedom drew one of their most telling innovations from the critique of liberalism that had been mounted by totalitarian German and Italian political thinkers from the interwar period. Although there were a fair number of such writers who were important for the European MPS members, the one that comes up time and again in their footnotes is Carl Schmitt, whom Hayek called “Adolf Hitler’s crown jurist Carl Schmitt, who consistently advocated the replacement of the ‘normative’ thinking of liberal law by a conception of law which regards as its purpose ‘concrete order formation’”; another was Bruno Leoni, who posited law as something best fortified as resistant to all popular alteration. It is a watchword among those familiar with the German literature that Hayek reprises much of Schmitt’s thesis that liberalism and democracy should be regarded as antithetical under certain circumstances155:
Liberalism and democracy, although compatible, are not the same . . . the opposite of liberalism is totalitarianism, while the opposite of democracy is authoritarianism. In consequence, it is at least possible in principle that a democratic government may be totalitarian and that an authoritarian government may act on liberal principles . . . [in] demanding unlimited power of the majority, [democracies] become essentially anti-liberal.156
Since the epistemic innovations covered above informed the MPS thought collective that the masses will never understand the true architecture of social order, and intellectuals will continue to tempt them to intervene and otherwise muck up the market, then they felt impelled to propound the central tenet of neoliberalism, viz., that a strong state was necessary to neutralize what he considered to be the pathologies of democracy. The notion of freedom as exercise of personal participation in political decisions was roundly denounced.157 Hayek insisted that his central epistemic doctrines about knowledge dictated that freedom must feel elusive for the common man: “Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.”158 Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, citizens must learn to forget about their “rights” and instead be given the opportunity to express themselves through the greatest information conveyance device known to mankind, the market.159 The Neoliberal Thought Collective, through the instrumentality of the strong state, sought to define and institute the types of markets that they (and not the citizenry) were convinced were the most advanced. Hayek’s frequent appeals to a “spontaneous order” often masked the fact that it was the NTC who were claiming the power to exercise the Schmittian “exception” (and hence constitute the sovereignty of the state) by defining things like property rights, the extent of the franchise, constitutional provisions that limit citizen initiatives, and the like. As Scheuerman writes about the comparison with Hayek, “For Carl Schmitt, the real question is who intervenes, and whose interests are to be served by intervention.”160
In too many ways to enumerate here, the reaction of both economists and the NTC to the global economic crisis is a case study in the applications of Schmitt’s doctrine of the exception. All the rationalizations of the Federal Reserve “staying within its legal mandate” went out the window the minute it started to block market verdicts on which banks should fail; the American government followed by deciding which auto firms and insurance companies would live or die; the imperious negation of market diktat continued apace with a stream of further arbitrary decisions. Governors in Michigan began to oust legitimately elected local officials, and replace them with unelected “emergency managers”; mortgage firms set about to ignore long-standing legal restrictions on conveyance and foreclosure. Similar things began to happen within the European Union, with the imposition of unelected prime ministers in Greece and Italy, and the suspension of competition guidelines at the Brussels level. As Will Davies so perceptively noted, “In answer to the question of whether neoliberalism is alive or dead, it seems entirely plausible to speak of an ongoing or permanent state of exception.”161 The NTC has demonstrated that true political power resides in the ability to make the decision to “suspend” the market in order to save the market.
As in so many other areas, they were merely echoing Schmitt’s position that “Only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free-market economy” and “Only a strong state can generate genuine decentralization, [and] bring about free and autonomous domains.” This was echoed (without attribution) by Hayek: “If we proceeded on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”162
One can therefore only second the verdict of Christi that, “In truth, Hayek owed much to Schmitt, more than he cared to recognize.”163 For Hayek and the neoliberals, the Führer was replaced by the figure of the entrepreneur, the embodiment of the will-to-power for the community, who must be permitted to act without being brought to rational account. While he probably believed he was personally defending liberalism from Schmitt’s withering critique, his own political “solution” ended up resembling Schmitt’s “total state” more than he could bring himself to admit. If it had been apparent to his audience that he was effectively advocating an authoritarian reactionary despotism as a replacement for classical liberalism, it would certainly have not gone down smoothly in the West right after World War II. Further, there was no immediate prospect of a strong authority taking over the American university system (by contrast with Germany in the 1930s) and sweeping the stables clean. In an interesting development not anticipated by Schmitt, Hayek and his comrades hit upon the brilliant notion of developing the “double truth” doctrine of neoliberalism—namely, an elite would be tutored to understand the deliciously transgressive Schmittian necessity of repressing democracy, while the masses would be regaled with ripping tales of “rolling back the nanny state” and being set “free to choose”—by convening a closed Leninist organization of counterintellectuals. There would be no waiting around until some charismatic savior magically appeared to deliver the Word of Natural Order down from the Mont to the awestruck literati. Intellectual credibility could not be left to the vagaries of “spontaneous order.” The constellation of double-truth doctrines enumerated in this chapter are the direct consequence of Schmitt’s definition of politics as the logic of the friend/enemy distinction.
This was sometimes admitted by members of Mont Pèlerin in public, but only when they felt that their program was safely in the ascendant:
Let’s be clear, I don’t believe in democracy in one sense. You don’t believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. You will find it hard to find anybody who will say that if, that is democracy interpreted as majority rule. You will find it hard to find anybody who will say that at 55% of the people believe the other 45% of the people should be shot. That’s an appropriate exercise of democracy . . . What I believe is not a democracy but an individual freedom in a society in which individuals cooperate with one another.164
Christian Arnsperger has captured the double-truth doctrine nicely, by insisting that Hayek had denied to others the very thing that gave his own life meaning: the imprimatur to theorize about “society” as a whole, to personally claim to understand the meaning and purpose of human evolution, and the capacity to impose his vision upon them through a political project verging upon totalitarianism. It was, as Arnsperger puts it, a theory to end all theories; not so different from the “end of history” scenarios so beloved of his epigones. The doctrine of special dispensation for the Elect is one very powerful source of ongoing attractions of neoliberalism, viz., the feeling of having surrendered to the wisdom of the market by coming to know something most of the nattering crowd can’t possibly glimpse: freedom itself must be as unequally distributed as the riches of the marketplace.165
Of course, any embittered autodidact in his darkened room is “fre
e” to believe that he deserves the same intellectual dispensation as the one eventually granted to Hayek. The world is full of minor Raskolnikovs with their contempt and disdain for the ignorant herd. But therein lies the critical difference, which is the most important fact for understanding neoliberalism: the NTC had been working assiduously to support his (and their) special vision for decades before his own dispensation came to be taken seriously by the larger culture, as demonstrated in Figure 2.4 in tabulated mentions of Hayek in the press and British Parliament.166 There was always the danger that the masses he had so haughtily disdained would have returned the favor and consigned him to oblivion. The double-truth doctrines we have summarized here did not readily lend themselves to popularization or general acceptance in the postwar milieu. But tremendous effort, team tenacity, and a very timely Nobel Prize revived his prospects.167 And now, if there was ever a figure who received an intellectual boost from the crisis, it would be difficult for them to claim parity with the revival of Friedrich Hayek
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Figure 2.4: Mentions of Friedrich Hayek in Various English-Language Sources, 1931–1991
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Source: Gilles Cristophe, University of Lille I
In the aftermath of the crisis, Hayek is now treated as a seer of prodigious perspicuity; and at the exhortation of Glenn Beck, his Road to Serfdom has been read (or maybe just scanned) by thousands who will never be bothered to delve much deeper into neoliberalism, or come to comprehend the political project that they feel speaks to them. But then again, it may be because the actual dry and stilted Hayekian encyclicals have less to do with all that than the fact that neoliberal images now so pervade cultural discourse that the situation has far transcended explicit political theory.168
In the next chapter, we leave the scriptures behind, to begin to contemplate everyday neoliberalism.
3
Everyday Neoliberalism
The mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in U.S. political life, why the conservative message seems so much more straightforward and stimulating, why they’re all having so much more goddamn fun than the left . . . That the U.S. left enjoyed this sort of energized coalescence in the 1960s and ’70s but has (why not admit the truth?) nothing like it now is what lends many of the left’s complaints about talk radio a bitter whiny edge.1
And that was before the crisis.
Starting from a heightened appreciation for the complexity and double truth of the neoliberal heritage, we can now make a fortified assault on this question: How did neoliberalism apparently come through the crisis unscathed?
Chapter 2 made the case that much hinges upon the interplay of the sociological structure of the Neoliberal Thought Collective built up around the Mont Pèlerin Society and the stratification of esoteric and exoteric doctrines, depending upon one’s location within or without the Russian doll. Briefly reiterating, different cadres are supposed to maintain different understandings of the “true” political implications of the neoliberal project, as one of the internal structural aspects of the project. However, I need to emphasize that, while a necessary precondition, this consilience of doctrine and function is not at all sufficient by itself to “explain” the modern success of the movement. All it accomplished was to help us identify its intellectual provenance and genealogy. The tenacity of neoliberal doctrines that might have otherwise been refuted at every turn since 2008 has to be rooted in the extent to which a kind of “folk” or “everyday” neoliberalism has sunk so deeply into the cultural unconscious that even a few rude shocks can’t begin to bring it to the surface long enough to provoke discomfort.
The relationship between culture and politics is an age-old topic that rarely commands much assent. Often one reads statements such as “Culture is now saturated with a market-oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining”; or, “The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms.”2 That is not the claim being argued for in this chapter. Indeed, the impression that there exists a single coherent “market mentality” seeping into every pore turns out to be a big part of the problem. Neither has “governmentality” been as helpful a concept as it might have initially appeared. Martijn Konings has complained about recent work of a “constructivist” orientation that has not altogether escaped the dichotomy between government and a separate “market”:
[R]ecent work in political economy has taken up the theme of social construction in a somewhat abortive manner. Concerned not to end up in the muddy methodological waters of postmodernism, it has generally been reluctant to consider social construction as extending “all the way down” to the basic facts of economic life . . . It has tended to do so by retreating from the explanation of the internal structures and “technical” aspects of markets and focusing primarily on formal regulatory institutions . . . In this way, it has tended to employ a very restricted notion of construction, one that sees it as limited to the organizational environment of markets but does not really see it to be at the core of what our everyday experience of economic life is about. In the end, international political economy still presents us with a world of regulators and markets.3
It is not that many of these writers don’t realize that neoliberalism has become entrenched at a very personal level of existence: indeed, Foucault is often credited with having insisted upon that very notion. However, the proposition, if contemplated at all, has mostly been explored at an austere level of abstraction—for instance, Foucault himself comments upon the theoretical writings of Gary Becker and the German ordoliberals; he was seemingly uninterested in how the dynamics actually played out at ground level. One might have expected Foucauldians to pursue that option; the next section inquires why this apparently hasn’t happened. Consequently, as Konings suggests, it has not been the political theorists or philosophers who have made the greatest strides toward understanding everyday neoliberalism; rather, progress has been made by a motley clique from anthropology, business schools, marketing agencies, law schools, and cultural studies who have explored the contemporary contours of neoliberal consciousness.
It began more than three decades ago with a brace of studies concerned to understand creeping “commodification” of sex, children, body parts, and discourse itself.4 One strain of this discussion initially lost its way by stumbling onto a quest for some “correct” ontological/moral criteria for the objects in question to qualify for quarantine in “separate spheres” of human existence away from the “market.” In seeking to displace the vernacular revulsion concerning market encroachment on the sphere of the sacred with something else, many of these authors sought secular succor in social science, only quickly to encounter an obstacle in the shape of neoclassical economics, which by that time had pretty much dismantled any ontological distinctions between the “market” and the rest of social life. A sort of ineffectual disdain for economists combined with incongruous simultaneous recourse to their neoclassical concepts (“public goods,” “efficiency vs. equity”) grew up around some quarters, which only further induced ingrained misconceptions concerning political theory; subsequently, attempts to erect citadels against “market logic” then became bogged down and immobilized in the literatures of communitarianism and virtue ethics. I think it fair to say most of this literature had simply turned its back on the pertinence of the phenomenon of neoliberalism, which accounts for much of its ineffectual irrelevance.
Another, more productive line of inquiry eschewed spelunking the ontology of the commodity in favor of Radin’s astute observation that questions of commodification would themselves rapidly devolve into questions of the nature of personhood; and this resonated with all manner of feminist scholars, anthropologists, and cultural studies advocates. As this contingent pursued their empirical explorations of recent alterations in what it meant to be a free an
d autonomous agent in the modern world, they increasingly found themselves brought back into confrontation with neoliberal political economy. Their writing was pitched just about as far from formal disciplinary economics as it is possible to go in the contemporary academy; perhaps it was this fact that allowed them to more directly access accounts of the NTC as germane to their concerns. Once they made the connection, they uncovered all manner of unexpected facets of the new personhood. It is their work that provides the fabric and texture of the current chapter.
They, and we, do not treat this construction of the neoliberal self as a monolithic Weltanschauung or cultural iron cage or industrial-scale brainwashing. Many people are sufficiently reflexive that they can and do catch glimpses of worlds outside the neoliberal ambit; they often indulge in bricolage to refurbish neoliberal materials into something else entirely; and of course, not every innovation emitted from the NTC has panned out or avoided intended consequences. Nevertheless, bulletins from the home front of modern agency do suggest we currently inhabit a quintessentially neoliberal era. This is a fact, not some cry of despair. Certainly it would be wrong to retreat to the easy slogan “there is no alternative,” although the possibility of dereliction on the left is entertained later. Rather, we shall attempt in this chapter to explore the accretion of neoliberal attitudes, imaginaries, and practices that have come to inform everyday life in the first few decades of the new millennium.
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste Page 12
