Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society. Verso, 2013.
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RATING: 72
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Dardot and Laval (hereafter, DL) have two things exactly right in this enormously useful book (first published 2009, and here in Gregory Elliott’s fluent and careful translation), and both are important. First, they insist that neoliberalism is not just an economic doctrine: ‘Neo-liberalism is not merely destructive of rules, institutions, and rights. It is also productive of certain kinds of social relations, certain ways of living, certain subjectivities. In other words, at stake in neo-liberalism is nothing more, nor less, than the form of our existence – the way in which we are led to conduct ourselves, to relate to others and ourselves. … The thesis defended in this book is that far from being an ideology or economic policy, is firstly and fundamentally a rationality, and as such tends to structure and organize not only the action of rulers, but also the conduct of the ruled’ (3-4). Second, they specify that ‘the principal characteristic of neo-liberal rationality is the generalization of competition as a behavioural norm and of the enterprise as a model of subjectification. … Neo-liberalism is the rationality of contemporary capitalism – a capitalism freed of its archaic references and fully acknowledged as a historical construct and general norm of existence. Neo-liberalism can be defined as the set of discourses, practices and apparatuses that determine a new mode of government of human beings in accordance with the universal principle of competition’ (4). And they remark later that the ‘requirement of 'competitiveness' has become a general political principle, which governs reforms in all areas, even those furthest removed from commercial confrontations in the world market’ (11). Their principal point of reference is Foucault, but they note (in passing, it has to be said) that while it is ‘distinct from an unduly narrow Marxism, such an analysis coincides with the most profound intuitions of Marx, who clearly understood that a system of economic production is also a system of anthropological “production”’ (12).
From this point, the book unfolds in two parts – five chapters on the ‘intellectual reformation’ followed by four on the ‘new rationality’. A conclusion then discusses the ‘depletion of liberal democracy’. The short section on ‘Neo-liberalism and the capitalist revolution’ (64-8), and the opening section (147-50) of Part Two (on the ‘great turn’ of the 1980s) may be read first to get a sense of its overall perspective, before you work your way through these chapters in order. The first of these concerns the Walter Lippman Colloquium held in Paris in 1938 to mark the publication in French of An Enquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (1937) as La Cité Libre, and addresses Lippman’s view that the market was not a natural order but a legal one: ‘Competitive capitalism was not a product of nature, but a machine that demanded constant supervision and regulation’ (63). DL rightly identify this, rather than the later Mont Pèlerin Society, as the founding moment of the neo-liberal project. For Lippman:
‘The agenda of neo-liberalism was guided by the need for constant adaptation of human beings and institutions to an inherently variable economic order, based on general, unrelenting competition. Neo-liberal policy must encourage this operation by attacking privileges, monopolies, and unearned income. It aimed to create and maintain the operating conditions of the competitive system. To the permanent revolution in methods and structures of production must correspond a constant adaptation of ways of life and mentalities. This required continual intervention by public power’ (64-5).
Lippman identified a ‘maladaptation’ that had occurred as a consequence of ‘a revolution in the mode of production’, and the consequent need for a ‘readjustment’:
‘Since it is proceeding among men (sic) who have inherited a radically different way of life, the readjustment required must necessarily take place throughout the social order. It must almost certainly continue as long as the industrial revolution itself continues. There can be no moment at which “the new order” is in being. A dynamic economy must in the nature of things inhabit a progressive social order’ (Lippman (1943 edition): 211, cited p. 65).
So, DL summarize,
‘This was the justification for a policy that must target individual and social existence as a whole, as the German ordoliberals were to repeat after Lippmann. This policy of adaptation of the social order to the division of labour was an immense task, he wrote, which consisted in “the finding of a new way of life for mankind (sic)”. … It was precisely up to the state and the legislation it generated, or guaranteed, to integrate productive and exchange activities into developing relationships, to supervise them by norms in harmony with productive specialization and the extension of market exchanges. Far from denying the need for a social, moral and political framework to enable the supposedly natural mechanisms of the market economy to function better, neo-liberalism must help redefine a new framework compatible with the new economic structure. Furthermore, neo-liberal policy must change man himself [sic; emphasis in original]. In an economy in constant motion, adaptation was always a current task to restore harmony between the way people lived and thought and the economic constraints to which they must submit’ (65-6, citing Lippmann, p. 225).
Echoing Marx’s insight (Capital, Vol. I, p. 618, Penguin/New Left Review, 1976) that once the ‘bourgeois mode of production’ was fully developed ‘the possibility of varying labour would necessarily become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice,’ in order to deliver ‘people who are absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of them’, Lippmann argued that future workers would have to educated (or bred – as he invokes eugenics as well as education here) ‘for a life in which they must specialize, yet be capable of changing their speciality’ (Lippmann, 1945: 212-13, cited p. 67). The identification of the neoliberal project with the imperative to shape human beings in every respect to the needs of capital through an enforced regime of competitiveness (other narrower definitions are available) is a productive one, and it gives the book its force.
So the opening section of Part Two argues that the ‘strong state’ is neither conservative, nor classically liberal, but rather reflects ‘the disciplinary character of the new policy, according government the role of vigilant guardian of legal, monetary and behavioural rules; assigning it the official function of supervisor of the rules of competition in the framework of an unofficial collusion with major oligopolies; and perhaps still more allocating it the objective of creating market situations and forming individuals adapted to market logics’ (148).
This neoliberal rationality emerged (tentatively, they argue, following Foucault, ‘in the course of the confrontation itself’ (149), rather than as a project fully formed in advance) primarily from the critique of the welfare state; it produced ‘techniques and apparatuses of discipline – that is, systems of compulsion, economic as well as social, whose function was to compel individuals to govern themselves under the pressure of competition, in accordance with the principles of maximizing calculation and a logic of capital valorization’: ‘The gradual extension of these disciplinary systems, as well as their institutional codification, ultimately resulted in the establishment of a general rationality, a kind of new regime of self-evident truths imposing themselves on rulers of all persuasions as the sole framework for understanding human conduct’ (150).
All of this is excellent, and it is underpinned by a detailed account of the long crisis of classical liberalism from the 1880s to the 1930s, as a dogmatic but no longer sustainable commitment to the inviolable rights of the individual came into conflict, from a bourgeois perspective, with the need for government intervention to confront organizational changes in capitalism, class conflicts, and a new international balance of power. The doctrine of the free market did not fit the oligarchic and highly concentrated forms of capitalism that emerged in Germany and the United States in particular, and ‘the ideal of the perfectly competitive market … seemed very far removed from the realities of the new large-scale capitalism’. (23). Here DL reference in particular Herbert Spencer’s ‘violent reaction … against economic and social intervention’ (28). Spencerism, with its absolute commitment to laissez-faire ideas and its idiosyncratic reading of Darwin’s theory of natural selection (rendered as the “survival of the fittest”): it was a ‘veritable turning point’ (32), because of its focus on competition between individuals as ‘the very principle of the progress of humanity’ (34), and its application to economic competition.
This reflected a shift from a ‘benevolent’ notion of the division of labour and specialization as promoting gains for all, with competition as a means to that end, as sustained by Smith and Ricardo, to one of competition and selective elimination as ‘the pitiless law of life and the mechanism of progress via elimination of the weakest’ (34); and it was this ‘social competivism’, rather than classical liberalism, that American industrialists such as Carnegie and Rockefeller invoked to justify their giant enterprises: Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner provided academic underpinning by drawing the moral: competition was ‘a law of nature’: ‘If we do not like it, and if we try to amend it, there is only one way in which we can do it. We can take from the better and give to the worse. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and throw them on those who have done better. We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to those who have done worse. We shall thus lessen the inequalities. We shall favour the survival of the unfittest, and we shall accomplish this by destroying liberty’ (Sumner,The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, Yale University Press, 2014 – cited here p. 36 without page number: p. 25 in the online text published by the Liberty Fund at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sumner-the-challenge-of-facts-and-other-essays).
Spencer and Sumner were equally held back by their (entirely spurious) ‘naturalization’ of capitalist social relations. But the ordoliberals and neoliberals on whom DL focus flatly rejected the idea that human beings had a ‘natural affinity’ with capitalism. The value of their analysis is that it steps back before the ‘social democracy gives way to neoliberalism’ narrative (often rendered as classical liberalism - social democracy - neoliberalism) to highlight the assertion of a doctrine of competitiveness and hostility to socialism in the context of the growing irrelevance of classical liberalism from the late nineteenth century onwards. And in a brief but illuminating section on Polanyi (42-6), they suggest that his prognostication of the end of economic liberalism underestimated the potential of what he termed ‘intervention for market operation’: but they remind us that he argued at the same time that ‘laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the thing to be achieved’, and that for as long as [the market] system is not established, economic liberals must and will unhesitatingly call for the intervention of the state in order to establish it, and once established, in order to maintain it’. Hence his comment that ‘consistent liberals’, including Walter Lippmann, ‘subordinated laissez-faire to the demand for a free competitive market’ (43, 45, citing Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 1957, pp. 139, 148 and 149).
The conclusions they reach are simple, clear, and compelling. First, economic liberalism is not against interventionism:
‘In fact, the distinction that needs to be made is between different kinds of state intervention. It can derive from principles foreign to commodification, and correspond to principles of solidarity, sharing, and respect for traditions or religious norms. In this sense, it forms part of the ‘counter movement’ that thwarts the principal tendency of the great market. But it can also result from a programme aimed at extending the marketization (or quasi marketization) of whole sectors of production and social existence, through public policies or social expenditure flanking or supporting the extension of capitalist enterprise’ (45).
Second,
‘neo-liberalism ‘is not simply a new reaction to the “great transformation”, a “reduction of the state” preceding some “return of the state”. It is more accurately defined as a certain type of interventionism intended politically to fashion economic and social relations governed by competition’ (46).
These arguments are now well established in the literature, and I apologise for labouring the point if they are familiar to you. But a third argument that informs the whole book is more original: laissez-faire as ‘a thing to be achieved’, in Polanyi’s words, is still a work in progress. It is to be achieved by the promotion of competitiveness, which may involve interventions of various kinds, but it is far from fully realised, even in the ‘heartlands’ of capitalism themselves. Among these interventions, those in which governments work directly on the thinking and behaviour of their own citizens are the most significant, and they are at the heart of the neo-liberal project.
DL pursue this line of argument, then, through from the Walter Lippmann Colloquium of 1938 (attended by Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Lionel Robbins, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Jacques Rueff, among others) to the post-war foundation of the West German state, and the European Economic Community. They emphasize the leading roles played by Röpke and particularly Walter Eucken in shaping the thinking of Ludwig Erhard, and the significance for the EEC of Müller-Armack’s 1946 formulation of the concept of the social market economy. Their account brings out a fundamental point: in contrast to the image of a social democratic welfare state displaced by ‘neoliberal’ state that eliminates any social agenda, the ordoliberal model (initially a hybrid of Eucken’s economic constitutionalism and Röpke’s social-communitarian construction based on subsidiarity and hierarchy) included a social dimension from the start but sought to make it complementary to an over-riding commitment to an order based upon competitiveness. There was initially a creative tension in ordoliberalism, then, between ‘economic policy’ and ‘policy of society’ (75-100). All agreed that ‘any production and exchange activity was performed in the framework of a specific economic constitution and a constructed social structure’ which could not be expected to emerge ‘naturally’ or spontaneously (77), and that it was the growth of state power, not the market economy, that destroyed the bonds of community (79). But while Röpke, Rüstow andMüller-Armack argued for auxiliary social policies not immediately derived from a logic of competitiveness, and for the first two, derived from religious or moral commitments, Eucken and the Freiburg School focused on the need for a constitutional framework through which the ‘order of competition’ based on the price mechanism would be secured, identifying six constituent principles: the stability of economic policy, monetary stability, open markets, private property, freedom of contracts; and the responsibility of economic agents (84).
This implied constant intervention, at two levels. First, to ‘order’ the overall framework, both through setting a framework in which the price system can operate, and through the psychological conditioning of individual mentalities (Seelenmassage), and second to ‘regulate’ the existing structures ‘in such a way as to cause them to evolve towards the order of competition or to guarantee their conformity to this order against any drift’ (86). In this framework all producers, whether workers or capitalists, were suspect, as they were likely to promote their specific sectional interest rather than the integrity of the competitive order as a whole. Individuals as consumers, on the other hand, had a common interest in the competitive process and the rules of competition. For Müller-Armack, then, the market economy was social because ‘it conformed to the choices of consumers, because it realized a democracy of consumption through competition by pressurizing firms and wage-earners to improve productivity’ (90). Crucially, it was not social because it included social goals that moderated the logic of the market, but because it was not ‘natural’: ‘a market order is an “artificial order” determined by societal goals. It is a social machine that must be regulated. It is an artifice, a technical means, which is bound to produce positive outcomes as long as no law contravenes market rules’ (91). Röpke was distinctive in the ‘archaic and nostalgic’ twist he gave to the preferred social order (arguing that the market economy was not everything, and extolling family, church, community, and small enterprise as counter-balances to the ‘highly dangerous sociological and anthropological state’ brought about by proletarianization, 96-7). But as the completion of the world market became a more perceptible reality, this position would largely be abandoned, so that today the preferred social order echoes rather than complements the logic of economic constitutionalism.
With this background in place, two chapters with self-explanatory titles (Entrepreneurial Man (sic) and The Strong State as Guardian of Private Law) spell out the basic conception of a legal and constitutional framework that leads and enables individuals to treat themselves as enterprises within a competitive order. The theme, in other words, is the creation of the neoliberal subject, well described by Lemke (2001: 203, cited p. 102) as ‘a political project that aims to create a social reality that it suggests already exists’. The first of the two chapters highlights the distinction between the static formalism of the neoclassical approach and the ‘Austrian doctrine’ that they regard as the signal contribution of Mises and Hayek: ‘It is starting from the struggle between agents that one can describe not the formation of an equilibrium defined by formal conditions, but economic life itself, whose real actor is the entrepreneur, whose mainspring is the entrepreneurial spirit that spurs everyone to varying degrees, and whose only impediment is the state when it curbs or abolished free competition’ (103). The following chapter explicates Hayek’s conception of the rule of (private) law, the crucial feature of which is that it requires a limit on all legislation such that the market as a spontaneous order (the product of human action but not of human design) is protected. The object of policy, then, is to ‘shape subjects to make them entrepreneurs capable of seizing opportunities for profit and ready to engage in the constant process of competition’ (ibid). The market, in this conception, is a subjective process, ‘a process of self-formation of the economic subject’ (106), and a social bond(125). Crucially, this makes it the duty of the state to protect the realm of private law based on the three principles of stability of possession, its transfer by consent, and the performance of promises, ‘or the essential content of all systems of private law: “freedom of contract, the inviolability of property, and the duty to compensate another for damage due to [one’s] fault”’ (129, citing Hayek, 2013: 206), and to subject itself also to the law. In this conception, neither the state nor the people can be said to be sovereign, as both are subject to judicial intervention which enforces respect for ‘the rules of the game’. As DL summarize: ‘a state that adopts the principle of subjecting its action to the rules of private law cannot afford the risk of a public discussion of the value of these norms, and a fortioricannot agree to leave it up to the will of the people to have the final say in this discussion’ (142).
After the opening section of Chapter Six, highlighted above, DL set out the means by which the state pursues ‘the objective of creating market situations and forming individuals adapted to market logics’. Much of the core narrative is familiar: the promotion of ‘regulation through competition’ by the IMF and the World Bank, the transition to financial and shareholder capitalism, concentration of income, competition between workers on a world scale, and rising personal debt. But it is the focus on the cultivation of neoliberal subjectivity as a matter of policy, and the manner in which governments and international organizations lead individuals to think of themselves as holders of ‘capital to be valorized’, as part of a new ordering of economic activities, social relations, conduct and subjectivities (156-7), that gives their account its originality: an ideology of ‘free capitalism’ masks systematic intervention by states and international organizations (159-63), backed by a complementary critique of the welfare state and its ‘demoralizing’ effect on individuals through its elimination of both risk and responsibility (163-8); a supporting ‘system of disciplines’ act on the action of individuals who are supposedly ‘free to choose’, particularly in relation to the labour market (168-74), but are in fact ‘obliged to choose between alternative sources of supply and incited to maximize their own interests’ (174-6); parallel practices inform the neo-liberal management of enterprises and their workforces (176-80); and an over-arching framework of ‘rationality’ (180-82) is produced and maintained by ‘submissive experts and administrators’ who ‘put in place the new apparatuses and modes of management peculiar to neo-liberalism’ (181). And the whole is legitimized through a ‘third way’ doctrine (182-90) that is in fact a surrender to the ‘new political project of global competition’ (182-3), perfectly encapsulated in the Blair/Schröder ‘Manifesto’ of 1999, and Giddens’ Third Way (1998; and Cammack, 2007).
The following chapter then steps back to the earlier period to address the ordo-liberal origins of the construction of Europe. It charts the continually extended and deepened ‘legal and political construction of a competitive market’ (193) along ordoliberal lines focused on ‘competivism’: ‘Free, undistorted competition, regarded as a source of economic efficiency, grounds the legitimacy of the highly normative directives and jurisprudence of European institutions. The legal norms defined by the Directorate General for Competition, and supported by the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice, all conform to economic objectives of well-being and competitiveness’ (194, ft. 4). From the 1948 German economic council through to 1957, ordoliberalism ‘provided the basics of the doctrinal foundation of the current European construction, before it became subject to the new global rationality’ (194); and, of course, it shaped the ‘four freedoms’ of the internal market – freedom of movement of persons, goods, services and capital, these being the fundamentals of the ordoliberal charter (195-6). And a ‘more radical logic seems to be emerging today, which is based on establishing competition between the institutional systems themselves, whether taxation, social protection, or teaching’, in what amounts to ‘an inflection of European neo-liberalism, by inverting the terms that characterized it: no longer fashioning the order of competition through European legislation, but fashioning European legislation through the free operation of competition’ (210-11):
‘This mutation corresponds to the desire of a number of currents to return to the sources of European neo-liberalism and even to radicalize it, so as to defeat what it had been necessary to compromise with: the social state, public services supplying social goods, and trade union power. It seems, moreover, that the “static” and statist conception of the first-generation ordo-liberals has now been superseded by the dynamic, evolutionist conception of the second generation “neo-ordo-liberals”, one of whose key concerns is European integration, which they would like to achieve through the “principle of competition between systems”. In other words, rather than fashioning a framework through legislation, they would like this framework to be produced by competition between institutional systems. Outsourcing, migration of workers, changes of residence – such are the vectors of the new European integration through competition’ (211).
In short, ‘whereas the original ordo-liberalism sought to supervise the market through laws made by states and European bodies, the new ordo-liberalism seeks to make the market itself the principle of selection of the laws made by states. … Such a trend indicates that certain forces within European neo-liberalism intend to evacuate liberal democracy of all its substance by depriving legislative powers of their main prerogatives’ (213). Enthusiasts for the European Union who are also critical of neoliberalism will want to reflect on this chapter.
So far, so good, then. Up to this point (two thirds of the way through) the book is essential reading. But although there is considerable value in what remains, it does not deliver as it might on the foundations laid down so far. This is for the simplest of reasons – DL go on to explore the contemporary logic of entrepreneurial government and the manufacturing of the neo-liberal subject with scarcely any reference to the driving material forces behind the contemporary salience of doctrines of competitiveness, among which ‘neo-liberal rationality’ is prominent. In the absence of any discussion of the ‘internationalization’ of capital itself from the 1970s onwards, the massive expansion of the world market, and the transformative rise of China and Asia generally that preceded the ‘global financial crisis’ and was significantly accelerated as a result of it, the illusion is created that it is neo-liberal rationality alone that structures and organizes the action of rulers and the conduct of the ruled. It is better seen as accompanying, encouraging and promoting, through purposive state and international action, the disciplines that are inherent in global capitalism itself, and have burst though intensively over the last fifty years. A critical reading of the text therefore requires a shift in focus, and it has important consequences.
Their account of entrepreneurial government rightly highlights the ‘anti-bureaucratic posture of the “modernist” fraction of leading civil servants and their accredited experts’, their contempt for public sector employees, and accompanying media campaigns (217), along with the ‘marketization’ of public governance, the invigilation of states by a set of supra-national and private bodies, and the public-private co-production of international norms (220): today, populations are not sheltered from the world market, but mobilized as resources for global capital (225) – pre-eminently by the likes of Blair and Clinton. In particular, DL identify a technology of control founded on a ‘logic of generalized evaluation’ (249) as the means by which norms and values are internalized and effective performance by civil servants (and workers in higher education) is sought, but draw attention to the drawbacks of the audit culture that results –not only demoralization and the dissolution of any shared ethic of trust, but also the perverse effects of excessive focus on hitting specific narrow targets, to the detriment of quality, and the real content of outcomes. Quite so. Is neo-liberal rationality not so rational after all, then? Or is there a flaw in the analysis. The latter, I suggest. At an earlier point, DL remark, in a rare acknowledgement of underlying material forces, that ‘control of subjectivity only works effectively in the context of a flexible labour market where the threat of unemployment is on the horizon of every wage-earner’ (180). Such a level of discipline is far more apparent than before, but it still contested, and incomplete. If it were not, the clumsy and contradictory schemes they highlight could be greatly refined, if they were needed at all. It follows that they should be seen as temporary and ‘second-best’ solutions or ‘fixes’ that reflect the incompleteness of the level of global competitiveness, rather than elements of a permanent regime of neo-liberal rationality. The same general consideration applies to their account of the manufacturing of the neo-liberal subject:
‘To achieve the objective of comprehensively reorganizing society, enterprises and institutions by multiplying and intensifying market mechanisms, relations and conduct – this involved a becoming-other of subjects. Benthamite man was the calculating man of the market and the productiveman of industrial organizations Neo-liberal man is competitive man, wholly immersed in global competition’ (256).
The evident focus on the masculine worker betrays a parallel failure to think through the relationship between the notion of individuals 'wholly immersed in global competition’, and the present character of families, gender relations and gender roles. All of these are changing, though quite differently across the world market as a whole, but remain incompatible with the picture DL give of the ‘neo-liberal subject’, promoted in part through the growing literature on ‘coaching’, personal enterprise, neuro-linguistic programmming and the ‘management of the soul’ (264-77), but seen as ‘the man (sic) of competition and performance’ (281).
But if these remarks need to be interpreted with care, they are as nothing compared to the bizarre turn taken by the analysis from this point. It lurches off to illustrate the new subjectification with competitive sport and with sexual practices, which they say ‘have become exercises in which everyone is encouraged to compare themselves with the socially requisite norm of performance. Number and duration of relationships, quality and intensity of orgasms, variety and attributes of partners, number and types of position, stimulation and maintenance of the libido at all ages – these have become the subject of detailed inquiries and precise recommendations’ (281). Where all this comes from I am at a loss to say, but it leads into a discussion of ‘the “performance/pleasure” apparatus’ (282), the invocation of Queen’s ‘We are the champions … no time for losers’ as capturing the spirit of the age (283), ‘psy’ discourse, clinical diagnoses of the neo-subject (288-96), and his (presumably) ‘self-pleasure’ and governance (296-9). So, they conclude: ‘The key question for the government of individuals remains how to programme individuals as early as possible, so that the injunction to boundless self-transcendence does not degenerate into unduly violent, openly criminal behaviour. It is how to maintain “public order” when pleasure has to be encouraged, while avoiding excesses. The “social management of performance” precisely answers to this governmental imperative’ (299).
This is a long way from the discipline of the wage in a globally competitive labour market, and much the worse for it. It is no surprise that after identifying the four principal features of neo-liberal reason (the market as a constructed reality that requires the active intervention of the state and a specific system of law; the essence of the market order in competition rather than exchange; the state itself subject to the norm of competition; and the extension of the desideratum of universalizing the norm of competition to individuals considered in their relationship with themselves) the conclusion is a narrowly focused appeal to ethical voluntarism. Given that neo-liberalism is inescapably the dominant rationality, the only avenue of resistance to it is ‘to promote in the present alternative forms of subjectivation to the model of personal enterprise’ (316), forms that would articulate subjectivation with resistance to power (318). They find a basis for this in Foucault’s discussion of ‘counter-conduct’ in the context of the crisis of the medieval pastorate (Foucault, 2007: 191-226), and conclude that: ‘To neo-liberal governmentality as a specific way of conducting the conduct of others, we must therefore oppose a no less specific double refusal: a refusal to conduct oneself toward oneself as a personal enterprise and a refusal to conduct oneself towards others in accordance with the norm of competition’; and this itself ‘can only practically occur on condition of establishing cooperative relations with others, sharing and pooling’ (320): ‘A collective refusal to “work more”, if only local, is a good example of an attitude that can pave the way for such forms of counter-conduct’ (ibid). That is, it seems, Just Say No. It leads to a final statement along the lines that a better world is possible.
‘The main thing is to understand that nothing can release us from the task of promoting a different rationality. … It is up to us to enable a new sense of possibility to blaze a trail. The government of human beings can be aligned with horizons other than those of maximising performance, unlimited production and generalized control. It can sustain itself with self-government that opens onto different relations with others than that of competition between “self-enterprising actors”. The practices of “communization” of knowledge, mutual aid and cooperative work can delineate the features of a different world reason. Such an alternative reason cannot be better designated than by the term reason of the commons” (321).
In itself, of course, this is fine, and it is worth noting than a further instalment is due for publication next year (Dardot and Laval, 2019). But to be seriously grounded, it requires some level of engagement with the disciplines of competitiveness as they currently operate on a global scale, and their direction of travel, along with the recognition that ‘neo-liberal rationality’ is still a work in progress, fashioned as much by the incompleteness of those disciplines as by their recent rapid advance, and by no means the primary driver they portray.
References
Cammack, Paul (2007) ‘Competitiveness, Social Justice, and the Third Way’, Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, 6, Institute for Global Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, at https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/11659/1/giddens.pdf.
Dardot, Pierre, and Laval, Christian (2019) Never Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy, Verso.
Foucault, Michel (2007) Security, Territory, Population, Palgrave Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1998) The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Polity Press.
Hayek, Friedrich ([1973] 2013) Law, Legislation and Liberty, Routledge.
Lemke, Thomas (2001) ‘The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collègede France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30, 2, 190-207.
From this point, the book unfolds in two parts – five chapters on the ‘intellectual reformation’ followed by four on the ‘new rationality’. A conclusion then discusses the ‘depletion of liberal democracy’. The short section on ‘Neo-liberalism and the capitalist revolution’ (64-8), and the opening section (147-50) of Part Two (on the ‘great turn’ of the 1980s) may be read first to get a sense of its overall perspective, before you work your way through these chapters in order. The first of these concerns the Walter Lippman Colloquium held in Paris in 1938 to mark the publication in French of An Enquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (1937) as La Cité Libre, and addresses Lippman’s view that the market was not a natural order but a legal one: ‘Competitive capitalism was not a product of nature, but a machine that demanded constant supervision and regulation’ (63). DL rightly identify this, rather than the later Mont Pèlerin Society, as the founding moment of the neo-liberal project. For Lippman:
‘The agenda of neo-liberalism was guided by the need for constant adaptation of human beings and institutions to an inherently variable economic order, based on general, unrelenting competition. Neo-liberal policy must encourage this operation by attacking privileges, monopolies, and unearned income. It aimed to create and maintain the operating conditions of the competitive system. To the permanent revolution in methods and structures of production must correspond a constant adaptation of ways of life and mentalities. This required continual intervention by public power’ (64-5).
Lippman identified a ‘maladaptation’ that had occurred as a consequence of ‘a revolution in the mode of production’, and the consequent need for a ‘readjustment’:
‘Since it is proceeding among men (sic) who have inherited a radically different way of life, the readjustment required must necessarily take place throughout the social order. It must almost certainly continue as long as the industrial revolution itself continues. There can be no moment at which “the new order” is in being. A dynamic economy must in the nature of things inhabit a progressive social order’ (Lippman (1943 edition): 211, cited p. 65).
So, DL summarize,
‘This was the justification for a policy that must target individual and social existence as a whole, as the German ordoliberals were to repeat after Lippmann. This policy of adaptation of the social order to the division of labour was an immense task, he wrote, which consisted in “the finding of a new way of life for mankind (sic)”. … It was precisely up to the state and the legislation it generated, or guaranteed, to integrate productive and exchange activities into developing relationships, to supervise them by norms in harmony with productive specialization and the extension of market exchanges. Far from denying the need for a social, moral and political framework to enable the supposedly natural mechanisms of the market economy to function better, neo-liberalism must help redefine a new framework compatible with the new economic structure. Furthermore, neo-liberal policy must change man himself [sic; emphasis in original]. In an economy in constant motion, adaptation was always a current task to restore harmony between the way people lived and thought and the economic constraints to which they must submit’ (65-6, citing Lippmann, p. 225).
Echoing Marx’s insight (Capital, Vol. I, p. 618, Penguin/New Left Review, 1976) that once the ‘bourgeois mode of production’ was fully developed ‘the possibility of varying labour would necessarily become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice,’ in order to deliver ‘people who are absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of them’, Lippmann argued that future workers would have to educated (or bred – as he invokes eugenics as well as education here) ‘for a life in which they must specialize, yet be capable of changing their speciality’ (Lippmann, 1945: 212-13, cited p. 67). The identification of the neoliberal project with the imperative to shape human beings in every respect to the needs of capital through an enforced regime of competitiveness (other narrower definitions are available) is a productive one, and it gives the book its force.
So the opening section of Part Two argues that the ‘strong state’ is neither conservative, nor classically liberal, but rather reflects ‘the disciplinary character of the new policy, according government the role of vigilant guardian of legal, monetary and behavioural rules; assigning it the official function of supervisor of the rules of competition in the framework of an unofficial collusion with major oligopolies; and perhaps still more allocating it the objective of creating market situations and forming individuals adapted to market logics’ (148).
This neoliberal rationality emerged (tentatively, they argue, following Foucault, ‘in the course of the confrontation itself’ (149), rather than as a project fully formed in advance) primarily from the critique of the welfare state; it produced ‘techniques and apparatuses of discipline – that is, systems of compulsion, economic as well as social, whose function was to compel individuals to govern themselves under the pressure of competition, in accordance with the principles of maximizing calculation and a logic of capital valorization’: ‘The gradual extension of these disciplinary systems, as well as their institutional codification, ultimately resulted in the establishment of a general rationality, a kind of new regime of self-evident truths imposing themselves on rulers of all persuasions as the sole framework for understanding human conduct’ (150).
All of this is excellent, and it is underpinned by a detailed account of the long crisis of classical liberalism from the 1880s to the 1930s, as a dogmatic but no longer sustainable commitment to the inviolable rights of the individual came into conflict, from a bourgeois perspective, with the need for government intervention to confront organizational changes in capitalism, class conflicts, and a new international balance of power. The doctrine of the free market did not fit the oligarchic and highly concentrated forms of capitalism that emerged in Germany and the United States in particular, and ‘the ideal of the perfectly competitive market … seemed very far removed from the realities of the new large-scale capitalism’. (23). Here DL reference in particular Herbert Spencer’s ‘violent reaction … against economic and social intervention’ (28). Spencerism, with its absolute commitment to laissez-faire ideas and its idiosyncratic reading of Darwin’s theory of natural selection (rendered as the “survival of the fittest”): it was a ‘veritable turning point’ (32), because of its focus on competition between individuals as ‘the very principle of the progress of humanity’ (34), and its application to economic competition.
This reflected a shift from a ‘benevolent’ notion of the division of labour and specialization as promoting gains for all, with competition as a means to that end, as sustained by Smith and Ricardo, to one of competition and selective elimination as ‘the pitiless law of life and the mechanism of progress via elimination of the weakest’ (34); and it was this ‘social competivism’, rather than classical liberalism, that American industrialists such as Carnegie and Rockefeller invoked to justify their giant enterprises: Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner provided academic underpinning by drawing the moral: competition was ‘a law of nature’: ‘If we do not like it, and if we try to amend it, there is only one way in which we can do it. We can take from the better and give to the worse. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and throw them on those who have done better. We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to those who have done worse. We shall thus lessen the inequalities. We shall favour the survival of the unfittest, and we shall accomplish this by destroying liberty’ (Sumner,The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, Yale University Press, 2014 – cited here p. 36 without page number: p. 25 in the online text published by the Liberty Fund at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sumner-the-challenge-of-facts-and-other-essays).
Spencer and Sumner were equally held back by their (entirely spurious) ‘naturalization’ of capitalist social relations. But the ordoliberals and neoliberals on whom DL focus flatly rejected the idea that human beings had a ‘natural affinity’ with capitalism. The value of their analysis is that it steps back before the ‘social democracy gives way to neoliberalism’ narrative (often rendered as classical liberalism - social democracy - neoliberalism) to highlight the assertion of a doctrine of competitiveness and hostility to socialism in the context of the growing irrelevance of classical liberalism from the late nineteenth century onwards. And in a brief but illuminating section on Polanyi (42-6), they suggest that his prognostication of the end of economic liberalism underestimated the potential of what he termed ‘intervention for market operation’: but they remind us that he argued at the same time that ‘laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the thing to be achieved’, and that for as long as [the market] system is not established, economic liberals must and will unhesitatingly call for the intervention of the state in order to establish it, and once established, in order to maintain it’. Hence his comment that ‘consistent liberals’, including Walter Lippmann, ‘subordinated laissez-faire to the demand for a free competitive market’ (43, 45, citing Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 1957, pp. 139, 148 and 149).
The conclusions they reach are simple, clear, and compelling. First, economic liberalism is not against interventionism:
‘In fact, the distinction that needs to be made is between different kinds of state intervention. It can derive from principles foreign to commodification, and correspond to principles of solidarity, sharing, and respect for traditions or religious norms. In this sense, it forms part of the ‘counter movement’ that thwarts the principal tendency of the great market. But it can also result from a programme aimed at extending the marketization (or quasi marketization) of whole sectors of production and social existence, through public policies or social expenditure flanking or supporting the extension of capitalist enterprise’ (45).
Second,
‘neo-liberalism ‘is not simply a new reaction to the “great transformation”, a “reduction of the state” preceding some “return of the state”. It is more accurately defined as a certain type of interventionism intended politically to fashion economic and social relations governed by competition’ (46).
These arguments are now well established in the literature, and I apologise for labouring the point if they are familiar to you. But a third argument that informs the whole book is more original: laissez-faire as ‘a thing to be achieved’, in Polanyi’s words, is still a work in progress. It is to be achieved by the promotion of competitiveness, which may involve interventions of various kinds, but it is far from fully realised, even in the ‘heartlands’ of capitalism themselves. Among these interventions, those in which governments work directly on the thinking and behaviour of their own citizens are the most significant, and they are at the heart of the neo-liberal project.
DL pursue this line of argument, then, through from the Walter Lippmann Colloquium of 1938 (attended by Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Lionel Robbins, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Jacques Rueff, among others) to the post-war foundation of the West German state, and the European Economic Community. They emphasize the leading roles played by Röpke and particularly Walter Eucken in shaping the thinking of Ludwig Erhard, and the significance for the EEC of Müller-Armack’s 1946 formulation of the concept of the social market economy. Their account brings out a fundamental point: in contrast to the image of a social democratic welfare state displaced by ‘neoliberal’ state that eliminates any social agenda, the ordoliberal model (initially a hybrid of Eucken’s economic constitutionalism and Röpke’s social-communitarian construction based on subsidiarity and hierarchy) included a social dimension from the start but sought to make it complementary to an over-riding commitment to an order based upon competitiveness. There was initially a creative tension in ordoliberalism, then, between ‘economic policy’ and ‘policy of society’ (75-100). All agreed that ‘any production and exchange activity was performed in the framework of a specific economic constitution and a constructed social structure’ which could not be expected to emerge ‘naturally’ or spontaneously (77), and that it was the growth of state power, not the market economy, that destroyed the bonds of community (79). But while Röpke, Rüstow andMüller-Armack argued for auxiliary social policies not immediately derived from a logic of competitiveness, and for the first two, derived from religious or moral commitments, Eucken and the Freiburg School focused on the need for a constitutional framework through which the ‘order of competition’ based on the price mechanism would be secured, identifying six constituent principles: the stability of economic policy, monetary stability, open markets, private property, freedom of contracts; and the responsibility of economic agents (84).
This implied constant intervention, at two levels. First, to ‘order’ the overall framework, both through setting a framework in which the price system can operate, and through the psychological conditioning of individual mentalities (Seelenmassage), and second to ‘regulate’ the existing structures ‘in such a way as to cause them to evolve towards the order of competition or to guarantee their conformity to this order against any drift’ (86). In this framework all producers, whether workers or capitalists, were suspect, as they were likely to promote their specific sectional interest rather than the integrity of the competitive order as a whole. Individuals as consumers, on the other hand, had a common interest in the competitive process and the rules of competition. For Müller-Armack, then, the market economy was social because ‘it conformed to the choices of consumers, because it realized a democracy of consumption through competition by pressurizing firms and wage-earners to improve productivity’ (90). Crucially, it was not social because it included social goals that moderated the logic of the market, but because it was not ‘natural’: ‘a market order is an “artificial order” determined by societal goals. It is a social machine that must be regulated. It is an artifice, a technical means, which is bound to produce positive outcomes as long as no law contravenes market rules’ (91). Röpke was distinctive in the ‘archaic and nostalgic’ twist he gave to the preferred social order (arguing that the market economy was not everything, and extolling family, church, community, and small enterprise as counter-balances to the ‘highly dangerous sociological and anthropological state’ brought about by proletarianization, 96-7). But as the completion of the world market became a more perceptible reality, this position would largely be abandoned, so that today the preferred social order echoes rather than complements the logic of economic constitutionalism.
With this background in place, two chapters with self-explanatory titles (Entrepreneurial Man (sic) and The Strong State as Guardian of Private Law) spell out the basic conception of a legal and constitutional framework that leads and enables individuals to treat themselves as enterprises within a competitive order. The theme, in other words, is the creation of the neoliberal subject, well described by Lemke (2001: 203, cited p. 102) as ‘a political project that aims to create a social reality that it suggests already exists’. The first of the two chapters highlights the distinction between the static formalism of the neoclassical approach and the ‘Austrian doctrine’ that they regard as the signal contribution of Mises and Hayek: ‘It is starting from the struggle between agents that one can describe not the formation of an equilibrium defined by formal conditions, but economic life itself, whose real actor is the entrepreneur, whose mainspring is the entrepreneurial spirit that spurs everyone to varying degrees, and whose only impediment is the state when it curbs or abolished free competition’ (103). The following chapter explicates Hayek’s conception of the rule of (private) law, the crucial feature of which is that it requires a limit on all legislation such that the market as a spontaneous order (the product of human action but not of human design) is protected. The object of policy, then, is to ‘shape subjects to make them entrepreneurs capable of seizing opportunities for profit and ready to engage in the constant process of competition’ (ibid). The market, in this conception, is a subjective process, ‘a process of self-formation of the economic subject’ (106), and a social bond(125). Crucially, this makes it the duty of the state to protect the realm of private law based on the three principles of stability of possession, its transfer by consent, and the performance of promises, ‘or the essential content of all systems of private law: “freedom of contract, the inviolability of property, and the duty to compensate another for damage due to [one’s] fault”’ (129, citing Hayek, 2013: 206), and to subject itself also to the law. In this conception, neither the state nor the people can be said to be sovereign, as both are subject to judicial intervention which enforces respect for ‘the rules of the game’. As DL summarize: ‘a state that adopts the principle of subjecting its action to the rules of private law cannot afford the risk of a public discussion of the value of these norms, and a fortioricannot agree to leave it up to the will of the people to have the final say in this discussion’ (142).
After the opening section of Chapter Six, highlighted above, DL set out the means by which the state pursues ‘the objective of creating market situations and forming individuals adapted to market logics’. Much of the core narrative is familiar: the promotion of ‘regulation through competition’ by the IMF and the World Bank, the transition to financial and shareholder capitalism, concentration of income, competition between workers on a world scale, and rising personal debt. But it is the focus on the cultivation of neoliberal subjectivity as a matter of policy, and the manner in which governments and international organizations lead individuals to think of themselves as holders of ‘capital to be valorized’, as part of a new ordering of economic activities, social relations, conduct and subjectivities (156-7), that gives their account its originality: an ideology of ‘free capitalism’ masks systematic intervention by states and international organizations (159-63), backed by a complementary critique of the welfare state and its ‘demoralizing’ effect on individuals through its elimination of both risk and responsibility (163-8); a supporting ‘system of disciplines’ act on the action of individuals who are supposedly ‘free to choose’, particularly in relation to the labour market (168-74), but are in fact ‘obliged to choose between alternative sources of supply and incited to maximize their own interests’ (174-6); parallel practices inform the neo-liberal management of enterprises and their workforces (176-80); and an over-arching framework of ‘rationality’ (180-82) is produced and maintained by ‘submissive experts and administrators’ who ‘put in place the new apparatuses and modes of management peculiar to neo-liberalism’ (181). And the whole is legitimized through a ‘third way’ doctrine (182-90) that is in fact a surrender to the ‘new political project of global competition’ (182-3), perfectly encapsulated in the Blair/Schröder ‘Manifesto’ of 1999, and Giddens’ Third Way (1998; and Cammack, 2007).
The following chapter then steps back to the earlier period to address the ordo-liberal origins of the construction of Europe. It charts the continually extended and deepened ‘legal and political construction of a competitive market’ (193) along ordoliberal lines focused on ‘competivism’: ‘Free, undistorted competition, regarded as a source of economic efficiency, grounds the legitimacy of the highly normative directives and jurisprudence of European institutions. The legal norms defined by the Directorate General for Competition, and supported by the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice, all conform to economic objectives of well-being and competitiveness’ (194, ft. 4). From the 1948 German economic council through to 1957, ordoliberalism ‘provided the basics of the doctrinal foundation of the current European construction, before it became subject to the new global rationality’ (194); and, of course, it shaped the ‘four freedoms’ of the internal market – freedom of movement of persons, goods, services and capital, these being the fundamentals of the ordoliberal charter (195-6). And a ‘more radical logic seems to be emerging today, which is based on establishing competition between the institutional systems themselves, whether taxation, social protection, or teaching’, in what amounts to ‘an inflection of European neo-liberalism, by inverting the terms that characterized it: no longer fashioning the order of competition through European legislation, but fashioning European legislation through the free operation of competition’ (210-11):
‘This mutation corresponds to the desire of a number of currents to return to the sources of European neo-liberalism and even to radicalize it, so as to defeat what it had been necessary to compromise with: the social state, public services supplying social goods, and trade union power. It seems, moreover, that the “static” and statist conception of the first-generation ordo-liberals has now been superseded by the dynamic, evolutionist conception of the second generation “neo-ordo-liberals”, one of whose key concerns is European integration, which they would like to achieve through the “principle of competition between systems”. In other words, rather than fashioning a framework through legislation, they would like this framework to be produced by competition between institutional systems. Outsourcing, migration of workers, changes of residence – such are the vectors of the new European integration through competition’ (211).
In short, ‘whereas the original ordo-liberalism sought to supervise the market through laws made by states and European bodies, the new ordo-liberalism seeks to make the market itself the principle of selection of the laws made by states. … Such a trend indicates that certain forces within European neo-liberalism intend to evacuate liberal democracy of all its substance by depriving legislative powers of their main prerogatives’ (213). Enthusiasts for the European Union who are also critical of neoliberalism will want to reflect on this chapter.
So far, so good, then. Up to this point (two thirds of the way through) the book is essential reading. But although there is considerable value in what remains, it does not deliver as it might on the foundations laid down so far. This is for the simplest of reasons – DL go on to explore the contemporary logic of entrepreneurial government and the manufacturing of the neo-liberal subject with scarcely any reference to the driving material forces behind the contemporary salience of doctrines of competitiveness, among which ‘neo-liberal rationality’ is prominent. In the absence of any discussion of the ‘internationalization’ of capital itself from the 1970s onwards, the massive expansion of the world market, and the transformative rise of China and Asia generally that preceded the ‘global financial crisis’ and was significantly accelerated as a result of it, the illusion is created that it is neo-liberal rationality alone that structures and organizes the action of rulers and the conduct of the ruled. It is better seen as accompanying, encouraging and promoting, through purposive state and international action, the disciplines that are inherent in global capitalism itself, and have burst though intensively over the last fifty years. A critical reading of the text therefore requires a shift in focus, and it has important consequences.
Their account of entrepreneurial government rightly highlights the ‘anti-bureaucratic posture of the “modernist” fraction of leading civil servants and their accredited experts’, their contempt for public sector employees, and accompanying media campaigns (217), along with the ‘marketization’ of public governance, the invigilation of states by a set of supra-national and private bodies, and the public-private co-production of international norms (220): today, populations are not sheltered from the world market, but mobilized as resources for global capital (225) – pre-eminently by the likes of Blair and Clinton. In particular, DL identify a technology of control founded on a ‘logic of generalized evaluation’ (249) as the means by which norms and values are internalized and effective performance by civil servants (and workers in higher education) is sought, but draw attention to the drawbacks of the audit culture that results –not only demoralization and the dissolution of any shared ethic of trust, but also the perverse effects of excessive focus on hitting specific narrow targets, to the detriment of quality, and the real content of outcomes. Quite so. Is neo-liberal rationality not so rational after all, then? Or is there a flaw in the analysis. The latter, I suggest. At an earlier point, DL remark, in a rare acknowledgement of underlying material forces, that ‘control of subjectivity only works effectively in the context of a flexible labour market where the threat of unemployment is on the horizon of every wage-earner’ (180). Such a level of discipline is far more apparent than before, but it still contested, and incomplete. If it were not, the clumsy and contradictory schemes they highlight could be greatly refined, if they were needed at all. It follows that they should be seen as temporary and ‘second-best’ solutions or ‘fixes’ that reflect the incompleteness of the level of global competitiveness, rather than elements of a permanent regime of neo-liberal rationality. The same general consideration applies to their account of the manufacturing of the neo-liberal subject:
‘To achieve the objective of comprehensively reorganizing society, enterprises and institutions by multiplying and intensifying market mechanisms, relations and conduct – this involved a becoming-other of subjects. Benthamite man was the calculating man of the market and the productiveman of industrial organizations Neo-liberal man is competitive man, wholly immersed in global competition’ (256).
The evident focus on the masculine worker betrays a parallel failure to think through the relationship between the notion of individuals 'wholly immersed in global competition’, and the present character of families, gender relations and gender roles. All of these are changing, though quite differently across the world market as a whole, but remain incompatible with the picture DL give of the ‘neo-liberal subject’, promoted in part through the growing literature on ‘coaching’, personal enterprise, neuro-linguistic programmming and the ‘management of the soul’ (264-77), but seen as ‘the man (sic) of competition and performance’ (281).
But if these remarks need to be interpreted with care, they are as nothing compared to the bizarre turn taken by the analysis from this point. It lurches off to illustrate the new subjectification with competitive sport and with sexual practices, which they say ‘have become exercises in which everyone is encouraged to compare themselves with the socially requisite norm of performance. Number and duration of relationships, quality and intensity of orgasms, variety and attributes of partners, number and types of position, stimulation and maintenance of the libido at all ages – these have become the subject of detailed inquiries and precise recommendations’ (281). Where all this comes from I am at a loss to say, but it leads into a discussion of ‘the “performance/pleasure” apparatus’ (282), the invocation of Queen’s ‘We are the champions … no time for losers’ as capturing the spirit of the age (283), ‘psy’ discourse, clinical diagnoses of the neo-subject (288-96), and his (presumably) ‘self-pleasure’ and governance (296-9). So, they conclude: ‘The key question for the government of individuals remains how to programme individuals as early as possible, so that the injunction to boundless self-transcendence does not degenerate into unduly violent, openly criminal behaviour. It is how to maintain “public order” when pleasure has to be encouraged, while avoiding excesses. The “social management of performance” precisely answers to this governmental imperative’ (299).
This is a long way from the discipline of the wage in a globally competitive labour market, and much the worse for it. It is no surprise that after identifying the four principal features of neo-liberal reason (the market as a constructed reality that requires the active intervention of the state and a specific system of law; the essence of the market order in competition rather than exchange; the state itself subject to the norm of competition; and the extension of the desideratum of universalizing the norm of competition to individuals considered in their relationship with themselves) the conclusion is a narrowly focused appeal to ethical voluntarism. Given that neo-liberalism is inescapably the dominant rationality, the only avenue of resistance to it is ‘to promote in the present alternative forms of subjectivation to the model of personal enterprise’ (316), forms that would articulate subjectivation with resistance to power (318). They find a basis for this in Foucault’s discussion of ‘counter-conduct’ in the context of the crisis of the medieval pastorate (Foucault, 2007: 191-226), and conclude that: ‘To neo-liberal governmentality as a specific way of conducting the conduct of others, we must therefore oppose a no less specific double refusal: a refusal to conduct oneself toward oneself as a personal enterprise and a refusal to conduct oneself towards others in accordance with the norm of competition’; and this itself ‘can only practically occur on condition of establishing cooperative relations with others, sharing and pooling’ (320): ‘A collective refusal to “work more”, if only local, is a good example of an attitude that can pave the way for such forms of counter-conduct’ (ibid). That is, it seems, Just Say No. It leads to a final statement along the lines that a better world is possible.
‘The main thing is to understand that nothing can release us from the task of promoting a different rationality. … It is up to us to enable a new sense of possibility to blaze a trail. The government of human beings can be aligned with horizons other than those of maximising performance, unlimited production and generalized control. It can sustain itself with self-government that opens onto different relations with others than that of competition between “self-enterprising actors”. The practices of “communization” of knowledge, mutual aid and cooperative work can delineate the features of a different world reason. Such an alternative reason cannot be better designated than by the term reason of the commons” (321).
In itself, of course, this is fine, and it is worth noting than a further instalment is due for publication next year (Dardot and Laval, 2019). But to be seriously grounded, it requires some level of engagement with the disciplines of competitiveness as they currently operate on a global scale, and their direction of travel, along with the recognition that ‘neo-liberal rationality’ is still a work in progress, fashioned as much by the incompleteness of those disciplines as by their recent rapid advance, and by no means the primary driver they portray.
References
Cammack, Paul (2007) ‘Competitiveness, Social Justice, and the Third Way’, Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, 6, Institute for Global Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, at https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/11659/1/giddens.pdf.
Dardot, Pierre, and Laval, Christian (2019) Never Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy, Verso.
Foucault, Michel (2007) Security, Territory, Population, Palgrave Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1998) The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Polity Press.
Hayek, Friedrich ([1973] 2013) Law, Legislation and Liberty, Routledge.
Lemke, Thomas (2001) ‘The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collègede France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30, 2, 190-207.