In his popular work The Road to Serfdom, one of Hayek’s main themes is the link between economics and freedom. Specifically, he attaches servitude to socialism and, as the logical converse, freedom to capitalism. Hayek begins this work by warning of the omnipresence of socialism, claiming that those in charge of development are all
socialists.3 He identifies socialism at different points as the enemy, slavery, the killer of liberalism, and totalitarianism.4
3
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (New York, NY: Routledge, 1944), 5.
Read discursively, socialism is “them,” the nebulous other that simultaneously embodies all that is wrong with the world and licenses the establishing of a new world order. The enemy is all pervasive and has set its intent on
4
For socialism as “enemy,” see ibid.; For “slavery,” see ibid., 13; For “”the killer of liberalism,” see ibid., 31; For “totalitarianism,” see ibid., 103 and 145.
enslavement and killing those who refuse to submit. The depiction of socialism in such stark language, while certainly useful for the affective engagement of his audience, begins contouring the terms of the antagonism that neoliberalism will then be able to constitute itself through. By naming socialism as a murderous, enslaving enemy, Hayek’s work produces an exigency that requires the construction of a challenging discourse, one which, perhaps too conveniently, will be socialism’s opposite—an “us” identified as friend, freeing, life-giving, and democratic. And Hayek delivers such a vision.
In a revealing, lengthy, passage, Hayek succinctly displays the manner in which a word, freedom, was co-opted by the socialists and how it must now be redefined
according to the new vision of liberalism as choice.
To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached. The new freedom promised, however, was to be freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which
inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the “despotism of physical want” had to be broken, the “restraints of the economic system” relaxed. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth…. What the promise [of this new sense of freedom] really amounted to was that the great existing disparities in the range of choice of different people were to disappear. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth. But the new name gave the socialists another word in common with the liberals and they exploited it to the full. And although the word was used in a different sense by the two groups, few people noticed this and still fewer asked themselves whether the two kinds of freedom promised really could be combined.5
He begins with a story of origins. Freedom belonged to the apostolic liberals;6
5 Ibid., 26-27.
it’s meaning apparently sacrosanct. Later, the enemy appeared, saw the power of the word
6
Recalling Harvey’s distinction that neoliberalism is a combination of liberalism and neoclassical economics, this nostalgia for liberalism, while rhetorically savvy, brings with it economic understandings of choice that produce the novel conflation of liberal political freedom with economic choice, thus this
freedom, and smuggled it into their vocabulary, thus changing its meaning to one which didn’t mean freedom at all, but meant its destruction. Now those who remain, liberal or socialist, are wedded to a freedom that brings their exploitation. The imperative rests on those who want freedom in the sense that Hayek outlines it above, where freedom means choice. But, in keeping with the notion of the negative constitution of a discourse,
Hayek’s work constitutes the new liberalism along the contours of socialism’s kind of freedom. Choice, then, is not some positive content of neoliberalism, but is precisely what socialism is not. Moreover, choice, an empty word in its own right, is now a (the?) necessary condition of freedom, perhaps the emptiest of words, and, following this logic, wherever one perceives a limitation or regulation of choice, one may articulate an array of claims that further instantiate the us/them divide.7
Additionally, Hayek repeatedly frames socialism as a centrally planned economy. While this may seem an innocuous connection, i.e., one may point out that a socialist government serves as a central body that manages the supply and demand of a nation, this way of describing socialism holds important consequences. By associating socialism with central planning, Hayek subsequently portrays socialism as an attack on choice, where planning “consists essentially in depriving us of choice, in order to give us whatever fits best into the plan and that at a time determined by the plan;” an attack on the individual, because “[c]entral planning means that the economic problem is to be solved by the community instead of by the individual;” an attack on competition, where socialism means “the end of competition and the creation of a planned economy;” and ultimately an
nostalgic projection performs the function of rooting something new, neoliberalism, in the past and provides neoliberalism with an historical narrative.
7
One example is the recent popular cry of the Tea Party claiming that Barack Obama is a socialist because of the limitations on freedom of choice they perceived as embedded in his administration’s healthcare plan.
attack on democracy, when “[t]he clash between planning and democracy arises simply from the fact that the latter is an obstacle to the suppression of freedom which the
direction of economic activity requires.”8 Had Hayek framed socialism as the dissolution of the division of labor, or the public ownership of the means of production, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels do,9
The point for neoliberal discourse is that with the enemy identified, the
antagonistic frontier can be drawn to distinguish between us and them, thus allowing for the differential constitution of the us as not them—they are centralized, we are not. Socialism serves this purpose for the initial formation of neoliberalism, and, later, the themes mentioned above (choice, competition, etc.) will become a central feature of neoliberal education reform in the United States. However, this feature would not begin to enter the realm of education policy until the early 1980s when the Reagan
the antagonism required to constitute another discourse would need to be arranged along different lines, lines which perhaps would emphasize division rather than decentralization. While this ultimately may produce something very similar to what neoliberal discourse maintains, its opposition of socialism would take a different angle, thus shifting the terms of the antagonism and the differences according to which neoliberal discourse constitutes itself. The significance of using central planning to form neoliberal discourse is that the antagonistic frontier separating them from us falls along the terms of centralization and decentralization. In other words, by identifying socialism as an antagonism, and framing it as central planning, neoliberal discourse constitutes itself around an absence, the terms of which are captured by what central planning is not, namely, decentralization.
8
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 104; 95; 149; and 74.
administration began shaping policy in line with the work of Milton Friedman, a student and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, who drew many themes from Hayek’s work and applied them to the Keynesian economic policy of the United States.