Framing the neoliberal canon: resisting the market myth via literary enquiry

Abstract

There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about 'free markets' stands in considerable tension with 'really existing' neoliberalizing processes. However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between 'pure' economic and political theory and 'messy' empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term 'science', techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the 'pure' neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.

Neoliberalism as Corporate Power

“…However, the ideational view of neoliberalism has, and the discourse around these core polices have, been deeply misleading for both proponents and critics alike, as Cahill (2014: viii) writesMany commentators mistakenly believed the capitalist world economy had come to resemble the free market, small government laissez-faire vision of such neoliberal thinkers and think tanks … . Such an understanding reflects an idealist, or ideas-centred, conception of reality … [that offers] an unhelpful portrayal of the dynamics of neoliberalism in practice.Similarly, as Bruff (2017) notes, because critics have tended to take the rhetoric of neoliberalism too seriously ‘the unspoken assumption is that the fight against neoliberalism is synonymous with the fight against free markets.’ Taking the rhetoric of neoliberalism literally has obscured key features of the politico-economic transformation that has occurred over the last 40 years. In particular, the demise of small, entrepreneurial firms and the concurrent rise of oligopolistic transnational corporations are difficult to discuss in the same breath as free, competitive markets (Cahill and Konings, 2017: 98).…”

“…This point is not new, and there have been various responses to neoliberalism’s contradictory character. Gill (1995: 405) uses the term ‘oligopolistic neoliberalism’, which for him involves ‘oligopoly and protection for the strong and a socialisation of their risks, market discipline for the weak.’ Similarly, more recently Bruff (2017) has termed it ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, which is about the ‘about the coercive, non-democratic and unequal reorganization of societies’.…”