ciphering the meaning of Neo-liberalism as a historical force and societal form requires the energies and know-how of a sagacious sleuth like Hercule Poirot. Wendy Brown, a philosophy professor at UCLA (Berkeley) and author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, has a Poirot intellectual sensibility and acuity that sees what most of us cannot.

Those of us who have written on neo-conservative politics and neo-liberalism as an economic form have illuminated many dimensions of "something new" that has emerged out of the collapse of welfare state liberal democracy in the West over the last five decades.

But putting all the pieces of this intricate puzzle together and detecting not only particular patterns but also the logic underlying neo-liberalism is a complex task.

What is the connection between the US Empire's contempt for law and truth-telling and neo-liberalism?

And how is it that citizens can be so passive in the face of evident government prevarication, endless spinning of false narratives, the evisceration of democratic morality and countless corporate and government scandals?

Most of us know that neo-liberalism as an economic form repudiates Keynesian welfare state economics and was propounded by ideologues like Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and in an earlier day, by the dubious intellectual propagandist Friedrich von Hayek.

In popular usage, neo-liberalism conjures up a cluster of ideas adumbrated by Brown: a radically free market, maximized competition and free trade achieved through economic de-regulation, elimination of tariffs, a range of monetary and social policies favourable to business and indifferent toward poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation and long-term resource depletion and environmental destruction.

Something new and darker is at stake

But something new and darker seems to be at stake. The crux of Brown's sophisticated argument is that the left fails to see the "political rationality that both organizes these policies and reaches beyond the market" ("Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy" [2003]). The left analyses do not capture the "neo" of neo-liberalism because they "obscure the specifically political register of neo-liberalism in the First World, that is, its powerful erosion of liberal democratic institutions and practices in places like the US."

In other words, neo-liberalism agents systematically aim to radically de-democratize their societies. The supreme triumph of corporate power in the world requires that liberal democracy be undermined. This means that political autonomy is jettisoned. Formal rights, private property and voting are retained, but civil liberties are re-cast as useful only for the enjoyment of private autonomy.

Social problems are de-politicized and converted into therapeutic, individualistic solutions (mostly through consuming a special commodity). The political rationality of neo-liberalism interpellates the governed self of the citizenry. Separated from the collectivity, this self is then absorbed into a world of choice and need-satisfaction through consumption that is mistaken for freedom.

Aware that the mere restoration of some ragtag social welfare state spiced with a pinch of climate change rhetoric is a dangerous delusion, Brown slices through the bramble bush of esoteric terminology to enable us to see that "neo-liberalism carries a social analysis which, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire." Neo-liberal rationality "involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social actors, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player."

Neo-liberalism ruthlessly sets out to subvert democracy

Neo-liberalism is a project requiring ruthless construction: plotting, planning and execution of the animating vision—in every domain of life. Donald Gutstein's detailed study of Harperism: How Stephen Harper and his thank tank colleagues have transformed Canada (2014) hit me between the teeth.

Good god! This guy moved stealthily and incrementally according to a "master plan": to dismantle Canadian democracy and free the society for total corporate domination without citizen recourse. It was systematic! It was devilish! He did it behind closed doors and in the twilight under our noses! Voter ignorance permits these bastards to blast the world back into the medieval era of serfdom and anti-enlightenment beliefs and degrading practices.

This intention to subvert liberal democracy has not been fully grasped by those on the left. That's Brown's wake-up call. And it is a salient one. It may provide us clues to understanding puzzling elements of the contemporary world such as lying without consequences, total absence of moral principle underpinning actions, abject inconsistency, utter hard-heartedness towards the vulnerable and contempt for democratic deliberation and international diplomacy.

Specific characteristics of the neo-liberal political rationality

To help us sort these things out, Brown identifies the specific characteristics of this rationality. Plunging in, Brown first points out that neo-liberal rationality configures human beings as homo oeconomicus. All dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality. Actions and policies are reduced to the bare question of profitability and the social production of "rational entrepreneurial action." Our schools are re-figured to pump out little brown-shirted entrepreneurs who know only calculation and competition.

Second, Brown states that neo-liberalism pedagogics intends to develop, disseminate, and institutionalize such a rationality. "Far from flourishing when left alone," Brown asserts, "the economy must be directed, buttressed, and protected by law and policy as well as by the dissemination of social norms designed to facilitate competition, free trade, and rational economic action on the part of every member and institution of society."

Neo-liberals only want to get the state out of providing for the security and well-being of its citizens. They use the state apparatus to enable corporations to serve only their profit-making without fear of legal regulation or moral demands. This means, then, that the market organizes and regulates the state and society. Therefore:

(a) By openly responding to the needs of the market (through immigration policy or monetary and fiscal policy), the state is released from the burden of a legitimation crisis (European critical theorists like Claus Offe and Jurgen Habermas had raised this concern in the 1970s). The new form of legitimation is simply economic success (it is also, I might add, the new, post-liberal democratic morality). The old norms of crime and morality are expunged from the cultural ethos of neo-liberalism.

(b) Under neo-liberal conditions, the state itself must think and behave like a market actor. The languages of cost-benefit analysis and calculation sweep in and consume public service and governmental practices. Under the Harper dictatorship's thumb, gags were stuffed in the public service mouth.

(c) The health and growth of the economy is the "basis of state legitimacy both because the state is forthrightly responsible for the health of the economy and because of the economic rationality to which state practices have been submitted." The watchword of neo-liberalism is: "It's the economy, stupid."

The third characteristic, then, of this depraved neo-liberal rationality (which wrenches itself free of the constraints of the old liberal democratic paradigm) has to do with the "extension of economic rationality to formerly non-economic domains and institutions extends to individual conduct, or more precisely, prescribes citizen-subject conduct in a neo-liberal order." Famously, Habermas termed this the "colonization of the lifeworld."

There is something disturbingly monstrous now before us. The classical liberal thinker Adam Smith set out the necessity of tension between individual moral and economic actions. This crucial distinction collapses, Brown maintains, because neo-liberalism has figured us as rational, calculating machines. Thus, to be "morally autonomous" means that we take care of our own needs and fund our own self-projects.

Pedagogics (in schools and everyday life) orients its students to consider the costs, benefits, and consequences of individual action. But this "responsibility for the self" gets carried to new heights as support for the vulnerable and needy is withdrawn. They are on their own. Didn't Thatcher say: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families"?

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Please obtain permission to promote your site before doing so.  We are not a advertising site!

Spam tied to the writer's web site.

Where do you see spam? It shows the negative aspects of neoliberalism. Although you need normal IQ to understand it.

Quote from: katehon on December 08, 2015, 06:17:59 AM
Where do you see spam? It shows the negative aspects of neoliberalism. Although you need normal IQ to understand it.

If you insist on promoting your site, there has to be a recursive link.
In other words, promote our site at katehon, or have all your links to your site deleted from our forum.

Good Googlies. Where did this long winded bugger come from? He lost me when he ceremoniously accused Hayek of being a " dubious intellectual propagandist", of course with absolutely no reference to back his claim.

Quote from: katehon on December 08, 2015, 06:17:59 AMAlthough you need normal IQ to understand it.

Being sesquipedal doesn't always relate to IQ.

Quote from: Dori on December 08, 2015, 08:43:04 AM
Being sesquipedal doesn't always relate to IQ.

YEAH!!!   and, and, you could be really stupid too!!!  er, well something like that!   So there!   I can be just as stupid as a neoliberal... what's a neoliberal...?   Is that a Obamaist instead of a Maoist or commie-lib...?    big words are just so confusing, and they just keep making them up!   They'll be calling me a neoAmerican next... whew!

Glad I don't have to run this forum - being serious all the time, wears a guy out!   

Quote from: Hoofer on December 08, 2015, 09:18:06 AM
YEAH!!!   and, and, you could be really stupid too!!!  er, well something like that!   So there!   I can be just as stupid as a neoliberal... what's a neoliberal...?   Is that a Obamaist instead of a Maoist or commie-lib...?    big words are just so confusing, and they just keep making them up!   They'll be calling me a neoAmerican next... whew!

Glad I don't have to run this forum - being serious all the time, wears a guy out!   

That why we have chew toys.   

So there is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. Really?
One of the greatest minds in history, the Scholastic William of Ockham defined the family unit as the linchpin of society which was the vault of its culture but what the heck did he know!!!

Quote from: walkstall on December 08, 2015, 09:33:46 AM
That why we have chew toys.