Why Keep Up with the Neoliberals?

Why would anyone want to study the scribblings of neoliberals today?

In the eyes of many, neoliberalism is on the way out, its grip on politics faltering across the advanced capitalist economies. With the rise of the far right, so the argument goes, the big, interventionist state is back, along with protectionist policies and nativist rhetoric that no neoliberal worth the label would endorse. Though neoliberalism certainly paved the way for the far right by hollowing out democracy, driving up inequality, and demolishing the welfare state, the reactionary backlash these things triggered marks the end of the neoliberal era. Neoliberalism may have laid this egg, but what hatched from it was something altogether novel and different and thus requiring a new name.

I disagree with this perspective.

To be sure, there are without doubt big historical, social, and political changes afoot, and some of these appear to signify a break with key principles of neoliberal ideology. The second Trump administration makes for a good case in point. Its use of tariffs as a truncheon in international trade negotiations, for instance, clearly contravenes received neoliberal wisdom, which rejects tariffs on principle. Likewise, its blatant disregard for the constitutional rights of private citizens makes a mockery of the emphasis neoliberalism has always placed on the rule of law and the sanctity of individual freedom.

Yet where in the eyes of some this implies that neoliberalism is no longer an adequate name for the present conjuncture, I would respond by calling into question this use of the concept of neoliberalism in the first place. For it to be an analytically meaningful and politically valuable term, neoliberalism has in the first instance to be an historical category, a concept we use to identify, map out, and critically deconstruct the roads travelled by a particular ideological formation that, from roughly the 1980s onwards, became highly influential in different ways, at different points, and to varying degrees throughout much of the world.

As the gains of a large and still growing body of scholarship show, this conception of neoliberalism has proved highly productive. It’s allowed scholars to trace the development of neoliberal ideas, situate them within longer genealogies, position them in relation to ideas and movements found elsewhere on the political spectrum, and assess the impact they’ve had on thought, policy, institutions, and subjectivities. It’s also given us a much better understanding of neoliberalism as a hegemonic movement; that is, of the knowledge strategies neoliberal activists used and ecosystems they built in pursuit of their intellectual project. We now know how important think tanks were to the neoliberal project, for example, and the role such organisations as the Mont Pèlerin Society and the Atlas Network fulfilled in cohering and strategically organising them. We likewise have a much more fulsome grasp on the resources corporate sponsors, reactionary funders, and the billionaire class pumped into the neoliberal project over the course of its history.

In short, this historical understanding of neoliberalism offers a powerful means of delineating the contours of a highly influential hegemonic project and interpreting the ideas on which it rested. The relevance of this mode of analysis to the present moment, then, is that it allows us to identify which features of the current conjuncture passed through, were shaped by, or took inspiration from neoliberal ideas, agents, and networks.

By adopting this perspective we can easily see that, once again, claims that neoliberalism has died at the hands of the Trump re-election were premature. It surely matters, for instance, that Project 2025 was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, one of the most high-profile neoliberal think tanks in the world, and included a significant number of neoliberal intellectuals amongst its authors. What’s more, no fewer than a quarter of the other think tanks and organisations involved in Project 2025 have, over the past decade, received active Atlas Network support.

Likewise, what do we conclude from the fact that prominent neoliberal intellectuals like Václav Klaus, Stephen Moore, and Victor Davis Hanson have vocally supported Trump in the recent past if not that a significant section of the neoliberal movement has been able to reconcile itself to Trumpism?

My point here isn’t to suggest that we’re still, somehow, living with neoliberalism. My point is that this way of framing the problem is misleading. It will not do simply to ask whether neoliberalism remains the right name for the present. This reduces neoliberalism to little more than a label that may or may not adequately represent the ruling ideology even as it reduces conjunctural analysis to mere periodisation.

Instead, we should see neoliberalism in materialist terms; that is, as an adaptive ideology that must continuously adjust itself in the face shifting social, material, and historical conditions. While this doesn’t prevent us from recognising that some salient aspects of the present conjuncture fly in the face of neoliberal shibboleths it does guard against the kind of premature post-mortems that obstruct from view the very real ways in which neoliberal ideas, networks, and organisations continue to shape the present.

Instead of asking whether this is still neoliberalism, then, we should identify the themes on which neoliberals and the far right have been able to converge, such as climate change, anti-progressivism, immigration, or family values. We should pay attention to how neoliberals are parsing, making sense of, and normatively evaluating the political shifts we’re witnessing. We should ask how neoliberal authors reconcile the tensions between the received ideals of their intellectual tradition and those of the nativist and protectionist movements they’re allying themselves with. And, perhaps most of all, we should analyse which elements of neoliberal reason its own champions are willing to abandon in the process, like so many autotomised limbs.

My instinct is that if we resist using neoliberalism as a label that may or may not describe the present and instead deploy it critically for conjunctural analysis we stand to learn a lot not just about the history and present of neoliberalism but also about the workings of ideology. This, in any case, is what this blog holds out.

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