Selección de país o estado

According to Jessop (2013), ‘neoliberalism tends to become a chaotic concept’, and is more often used by ‘outsiders and critics’ than ‘by the advocates and supporters of the ideas, institutions, strategies and policies that this slippery concept is said to denote’ (Jessop, 2013: 65). Clarke (2008: 135) argued that neoliberalism has two core problems as a concept ‘it is omnipresent and it is promiscuous’. In the eight years since Clarke wrote that, I would argue that neither of these problems has gone away and that since then it has moved from

academic and political debate into the wider public domain, which has intensified rather than reduced or mitigated those issues. Regardless of the difficulties with the concept, however, its lack of specificity or singular definition, Hall (2011) argues that naming it is the necessary first part of the process to resist its effects. For my purposes, it is important to understand not only what neoliberalism is, but also what it does.

Despite the ‘slipperiness’ identified by Jessop, the term has gained purchase as a way to name a logic of governing that shapes the current UK context. For Harvey (2007),

neoliberalism is a sui generis ideology which, having begun in the field of economics, became more fully developed in a set of heterogeneous institutions including corporations, the media, education and professional associations (Harvey 2007: 38). It is a system in which ‘the moral benefits of market’ are identified as ‘a necessary condition for freedom in other aspects of life’ (Fourcade and Healy 2007: 301). Harvey (2007) argues that neoliberalism has

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become ‘hegemonic as a mode of discourse’, and notes that it ‘has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world’ (Harvey, 2007: 3). Where Harvey (2007) suggests that it is a system that appeals to our instincts, Bourdieu (1998) argues that neoliberalism has achieved the status of doxa. Doxa limits what is thinkable and what is sayable, and is the ‘absolute form of recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness’ (Bourdieu 1977: 168). Since neoliberalism presents itself as ‘truth’, its assumptions are forgotten as assumptions, and this, together with its ‘methodical destruction of collectives’ (Bourdieu 1998: 95, emphasis in original) renders a political system that is both ‘de-historicised and de-socialised’ (1998: 95).

It is this embeddedness in common sense that is demonstrable in political rhetoric and policy-making, and which is also identifiable within the conversations I had with the women who took part in this study, discussed in chapters Four, Five and Six, though as my analysis will show, not entirely, nor uncritically. Harvey (2007: 5) suggests that its dominance stems from the appeal it has to ‘our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit’. Certainly, for key neoliberal thinker Friedman (2002 [1962]) possibilities, (or more accurately, fears) can be a useful persuasive tool in the service of otherwise untenable ideas:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

(Friedman, 2002 [1962]: ix, cited in G. Slater, 2015:3) Following the financial crash in 2008, there was a swift adoption of the word ‘crisis’ to

describe the state of the banking sector and financial markets. In many countries, including the UK, the response was to introduce austerity measures, although as discussed in the introduction, to what extent the current government’s cuts can be described as ‘austerity’ remains debatable. What is not debatable is that one of the key projects of the Coalition and subsequent Conservative governments has been ‘welfare reform’. For some this leads to the conclusion that neoliberalism is ‘a brand of revanchist state politics that works to dissolve any collective basis for social welfare’ (G. Slater, 2015: 1, see also, Means 2013; Wacquant

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2010). By turning to the early development of neoliberal thought it is certainly possible to see this as one of those ideas that Friedman suggested could be activated under cover of a crisis.

Sometimes discussed as a recent phenomenon, neoliberalism has a long history, with the term itself being traced back to 1925 ‘in the Swiss economist Hans Honegger’s Trends of

Economic Ideas’ (Ganti, 2014: 91). Often cited as foundational is the Freiburg School of

economists and legal scholars who came together under the term ‘ordoliberalism’ in around 1950. Their main concern was with laissez-faire economic policies that they argued held the potential for large scale monopolies to damage free market competition. Arguing for some, limited, state regulation they were later very influential in the development of Social Market Economics in post-war Germany (Ganti, 2014; Lemke, 2002). Most usually scholars attribute neoliberalism’s early development as a set of economic principles to the Mont Pèlerin Society and Friedrich von Hayek (Harvey 2007, Ong 2006). The society was concerned for the future of classical liberalism, in particular, Hayek had written about the dangers of both Stalinist communism and Hitler’s fascism, and the danger of any form of collectivism

reaching the United States or the United Kingdom10 _{(Gregory and Stuart, 2013: 87). Not only} does this show that neoliberalism is not a new concept, but importantly, that collectivity is a key concern, whether in the form of business cartels, as for the Ordoliberals, or more widely in society. I would argue that these original fears have, over time, transformed into a

celebration of the individual rather than more particular concerns regarding communism or fascism.

Writing in 1998, Bourdieu argued that since neoliberalism derives from an economic base, it takes for granted ‘that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the ultimate and sole goal of human actions’ (Bourdieu 1998: 31). Neoliberalism’s development has happened across a variety of fields, such as academia, the media, politics and the workplace (Bourdieu, 1998; Harvey, 2007), and in the process, this vision of a driven individual striving to make the ‘best’ of their self, has been widely communicated. Harvey

10 _{Concerns surrounding the apparent ease with which people could become indoctrinated into mass}

domination were widespread among politicians and intellectuals at this time (Chaney, 1994). Fears about ‘human nature’ following two World Wars were, according to Kagan (1998: 94-96) what generated psychiatrists and psychologists to develop theories that were less pessimistic than Freud. For example, he argues that Bowlby’s attachment theory ‘thrives on the deep assumption that humans require love more than any other resource and the illusion that we can prevent men from hacking others to death by loving them when they are young children’.

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(2007) makes a similar point when he says that the market has become ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs’ (Harvey 2007: 3). Its principles, which prioritise de-regulation, privatisation, and competition, and that guarantee freedom in the marketplace subject to appropriate self-regulation and accountability, have been extended to the realms of healthcare, education, welfare and beyond. In effect, neoliberalism is not simply a set of economic practices in the same vein as classic liberalism, from which it derives, but now operates as a theory of the social and political which has been especially influential in shaping ‘Western’ governments (Brown, 2005).

Neoliberalism is then a governing rationality, in the course of which everything, including human beings, is ‘economised’. This is not simply a reformulation of the Marxist theorisation of the commodification of humans. Brown (2015) argues that it extends beyond money- making activities, into areas of life such as dating, and learning, and as I will argue, child- rearing. The point is that everything is subject to calculation and metrics, with a view to measuring its present and, importantly, future value.

It is incorrect Brown says to assume that neoliberalism is an economic system that has

unintended consequences (e.g. indifference to poverty, social deracination and cultural

decimation). Instead, she argues that the promulgation of market principles to all aspects of human and institutional life is the function of neoliberalism (Brown, 2003: 5). It is a form of governmentality and thus ‘a range of techniques directed at managing the self through the regulation of everyday conduct’ (Foucault 1991). Foucault’s neologism signifies not only a move from ruling over, to governing, but importantly, that this is achieved through appeals to the self. Brown goes on to explain that:

neoliberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as rational calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self- care’ – the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her/himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action

(Brown, 2003: 8). Brown acknowledges that Foucault was working before neoliberalism took hold as centrally in politics as it is now and that his interests were different than hers. He does, however,

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provide the analytic insights into governmentality on which she is able to build her

argument. Her extension of his analysis moves to an altogether more pessimistic possibility, not explored by Foucault, that democracy itself is on course to becoming unintelligible and redundant. In a 2015 interview11 _{she says:}

Democracy requires that citizens be modestly oriented toward self-rule, not simply value enhancement and that we understand our freedom as resting in such self-rule, not simply in market conduct. When this dimension of being human is extinguished, it takes with it the necessary energies, practices, and culture of democracy, as well as its very intelligibility.

By inflecting previously non-economic domains with an economic rationality neoliberalism normatively constructs individuals as entrepreneurial in every aspect of their life. This configures people as rational actors, with self-care as an injunction to behave morally, and accept responsibility (Brown, 2003, 2005). Morality, Brown argues, is then understood as akin to a cost/benefit analysis, but one that discounts any constraint to achieving imagined outcomes. So, for example, the link between work and the welfare state means that a rational (and therefore moral) actor will choose responsibly to get paid work; there is no room in this equation for those without qualifications or experience, a lack of jobs available, or childcare demands.

This explanation of the neoliberal subject is in line with the autonomous self-regulating and entrepreneurial self that critics of New Labour’s Third Way argue came to prominence as the ‘ideal citizen’. Framed within a distinctly moralised version of democracy, which relies upon configurations of success or failure, human beings are understood as ethical projects loaded with moral dilemmas (Rose, 2001; Clarke, 2005). This is a project of the self where the ultimate goal is to achieve independence, with citizens themselves responsible for creating the conditions of their own autonomy. In return the government takes a step back from excessive interference or regulation; they will ‘govern at a distance’ (Burchell et al 1991: 18). This is, to an extent, merely illusory, resting as it does on the responsibility to enact this freedom appropriately or as Rose (1998: 17) puts it ‘subjects are not merely ‘free to choose’,

11 _{Interview in online magazine Dissent, with Timothy Shenk (dated: 02.04.15)}

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-3-what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-wendy-brown-undoing-the- demos

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but obliged to be free’. Responsibilised citizenship is framed by the success or not of resolving these dilemmas:

New Labour’s ideal citizens are moralised, choice-making, self-directing subjects. (…) choice is framed by sets of injunctions about reasonable choices and responsible behaviour. Responsible citizens make reasonable choices – and therefore ‘bad choices’ result from the wilfulness of irresponsible people, rather than the structural distribution of resources, capacities and opportunities.

(Clarke, 2005: 451) We must choose to be ‘hard-working’ rather than rely on social security payments, health- conscious, to avoid using the health service, and communitarian, so as to reduce the cost of policing or cleaning our local environment. There is not an overarching moral code that we can consult and live by, but rather an ‘unstable assemblage of what is deemed ‘reasonable’ and ‘decent’ across a variety of sites and practices’ (Clarke, 2005: 451). Rose (2001: 3) is even more scathing about Third Way politics:

Not much is new in this politics, apart, perhaps, from the addition of a certain therapeutic individualism (the language of self-realization) and an expansion of the ethic of collective responsibility to include nature as well as humankind. Its

techniques of government are minor modifications of those already entrenched, with the infusion of faith in the power of markets (already jettisoned by the former

epigones of neoliberalism in the international economy) and a naive enthusiasm for the mantras of managerial gurus

Elsewhere Rose (1998, 1999) argues that the infusion of psychological technologies and knowledge across a wide terrain of social and public life, produce a qualitatively new way to know, and hence govern, individual citizens at the level of their subjectivity. Before

discussing Rose’s analysis of therapeutic individualism I want briefly to outline Foucault’s argument that knowledge cannot be dissociated from the workings of power. By revealing ‘on the basis of what historical a priori’ certain forms of knowledge become possible Foucault (1969: xxii), suggests that the ‘episteme’ which signifies the rules of knowledge formation for any given period can be discovered.

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