From Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
p54-5 “The thorny issue of just what sort of ontonological entity the neoliberal market is, or should be … The ‘radical subjectivist’ wind of the Austrian School of economics attempted to ground the market in a dynamic process of discovery by entrepreneurs of what consumers did not yet even know what they wanted, due to the fact that the future is radically unknowable. Perhaps the dominant version … emanated from Hayek himself, wherein the ‘market’ is posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentially patterned upon brain/computation metaphors…. Another partially rival approach to defining the market emanated from German ordoliberalism, which argues that competition in a well-functioning market needs to be directly organized by the state, by embedding it in various other social institutions.” Both sides “seem overly preoccupied with what it purportedly does, while remaining cavalier about what it actually is. For the neoliberals, this allows the avoidance of a possible deep contradiction between their constructivist tendencies and their uninflected appeal to a monolithic market that has existed throughout all history and indifferently across the globe; for how can something be ‘made’ when it is eternal and unchanging? This is solved by increasingly erasing any distinctions among the state, society and the market, and simultaneously insisting their political project is aimed at reformation of society by subordinating it to the market.”
p. 65-6 The neoliberal program ends up vastly expanding incarceration and the carceral sphere in the name of getting government off our backs. Members of the Mont Pelerin Society were fond of Benjamin Constant’s adage: ‘The government, beyond its proper sphere ought not to have any power; within its sphere, it cannot have enough of it.’ …. This is central to understanding the fact that neoliberal policies lead to unchecked expansion of the penal sphere, as has happened in the United States. … a definition of crime as inefficient attempts to circumvent the market. The implication is that intensified state power in the police sphere (and a huge expansion of prisoners incarcerated) is fully complementary with the neoliberal concept of freedom. …. there is also a natural stratification in what classes of law are applicable to different scofflaws: ‘the criminal law is designed primarily for the nonaffluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”
p. 80 “you have Hobson’s choice: either the abject embrace of ignorance or abject capitulation to slavery. The Third Way of the nurturing and promotion of individual wisdom is for Hayek a sorry illusion.’ The Market works because it fosters cooperation without dialogue; it works because the values it promotes are noncognitive. The job of education for neoliberals like Hayek is not so much to convey knowledge per se as it is to foster passive acceptance in the hoi polloi towards the infinite wisdom of the Market…. Formal political processes where citizens hash out their differences and try to convince one another are uniformly deemed inferior ro those ‘spontaneous processes’ wherein, it must be noted, insight seems to descend out of the aether to inhabit individual brains like the tongues of the Holy Ghost; this constitutes one major source of the neoliberal hostility to democratic governments.”
p. 84 “Since the epistemic innovations … informed the MPS thought collective that the masses will never understand the true architecture of social order, and intellectuals will continue to tempt them to intervene and otherwise muck up the market, then they felt impelled to propound the central tenet of neoliberalism, viz. that a strong state was necessary to neutralize …. the pathologies of democracy. The notion of freedom as exercise of personal participation in political decisions was roundly denounced.”
p. 108 Everyday neoliberalism – “The banishment of the core unified self is experienced daily in a thousand different ways by every single person who holds down a job, gets ejected from a job, gets sick, surfs the Internet, sits in a classroom, embarks on a love affair, watches a movie, emulates a celebrity, or starts a family. The news is brought home in most instances wherein someone is forced to juggle multiple roles in social stuations, and discovers that the demands of one role contradict or belie those of another. … It is the sheer ordinariness of the expectation that the self should provide no obstacle to success because it is supple, modular and plastic that is the germ of everyday neoliberalism. The traces of the vanishing self are of course pervasive in economic life, but are by no means confined to it… the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her resume, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele and the customer of her own life. She is a jumble of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but equally am offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsources, shorted, hdeged against and minimized. .. The summum bonum of modern agency is to present oneself as eminently flexible in any and all respects.”
p. 116 – “A striking characteristic of the neoliberal approach to selfhood is the intransigent renunciation of most forms of classification of people. … imposition of any categorization [like class] is deemed imperious and elitist. .. whatever their predicament, whatever their station in life, everyone is encouraged to think they, too, can be Metis, unperturbed (or ignorant) that their fate is to be consumed by Zeus. Time and again, the supposed success of some teen idol or hedge fund manager or sports star is said to illustrate the tired platitude that ‘you can be anything that you want to be, if you want it bad enough’.”
p. 119 “Embracing risk and taking chances is the putative mark of the entrepreneur, the only solid evidence that the agent has been actively engaged in pursuit of self-advantage, as opposed to passively accepting the lot that has been bequeathed to him by others. .. it is not portrayed as actuarial risk, reducible to probabllities and expected values, but rather bald, impetuous abandon in the face of an intrinsically unknowable future. … It is, quite literally, an irrational leap of faith, with the parallels to religious traditions intentional. This is one reason that participation in neoliberal life necessitates acting as an entrepreneur of the self… Alternatively, anyone who participates in the welfare state is just a dull drone, lost in a vegetative state. They are debased because they expect the state to shield them from risk, when, in fact, they should be reveling in the opportunity to remake themselves … success accrues to those who grasp rashly and imperiously for self-gratification.”
The TES review.
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