Neoliberalism and Its Discontents: Commentary on Social Psychology of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Neoliberalism is an odd word that crept into our everyday discourse. According to my quick Ngram search of Google Books, 1 it began to appear in the 1980s around the time of the Thatcher-Reagan trans-Atlantic alliance, and its popularity outpaced even that of "Trump" in its combined corpus of American and British books-though I doubt if that's still the case now especially after 2016. I used to think neoliberalism meant a class of economic theories about a market as a mechanism for balancing the production and consumption of everyday goods and services like bread and butter, rice and soy sauce, or pita and hummus, whose core assumption is "homo economicus," a fictional being that a Nobel laureate of economics Eleanor Ostrom (2000) once called a rational egoist. But its meaning has expanded (wrongly, I thought) over the decades to cover goods and services of all sorts, including labor, education, and health care-a kind of "concept creep" that Haslam (2016) described about our ordinary use of psychological concepts. Beattie's (2019) critical dissection has corrected my misunderstanding. Even from the start, the loose cluster of ideas that is now called neoliberalism was a politicaleconomic ideology. It was meant to provide a foundational design principle for constructing institutions of governance.Nonetheless, it seems correct to say that neoliberalism has at least two component idea clusters: the rational and self-interested homo economicus as a model of the person and the idealized market with perfect information transmission and infinite computational capacity (or what Beattie, 2019, called the supercomputer metaphor) as a model of the society. Put differently, neoliberalism is a model of the person and the society-a kind of utopian vision-which was meant to describe

The Moral Reasoning of Ideology: The Mediating Role of Moral Foundations, Moral Absolutism, and Consistency Norm

“…Neoliberalism, also, presupposes freedom from the constraints of external interventions and posits effectively competitive relationships in the context of minimal state interventions as a common premise (Beattie, 2019). By emphasizing individual freedom, self-expression and personal development (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) over other liberal values such as equality, it reinforces individualistic psychological tendencies (Adams et al, 2019;Kashima, 2019) and constitutes a highly attractive context for ambitious individuals (Davies, 2016). Rejecting, anything that impedes individual development and expression -even if they are obligations-enhances private initiative and individual economic interest as means and measures of personal well-being and happiness (Adams et al, 2019;Venugopal, 2015), and puts at risk the terms of social engagement.…”

Enactivism and Correctional Science: An Analysis of Forensic Treatment of Agency in a Neoliberal Climate

“…A core feature targeted in the criticism of neoliberal thought, is the tradition of individualism of Western thought, as perpetuated by its epistemology (Adams, Estrada-Villalta, Sullivan & Markus, 2019;Kashima, 2019;Pickren, 2018). One of the ideological grandfathers of neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, set the foundation for psychologists, arguing for a prioritisation of individual elements in the social sciences, as opposed to 'wholes' or 'entities' such as economic systems or ideologies (Bettache & Chiu, 2019).…”

Aberrational Socialization as a New Type of Socialization of an Individual in Modern Information Society

“…In this connection, scholars (Awan & Gauntlett, 2013;Boldakova, 2015;Smith & Travis, 2001;Kashima, 2019;Zizek, 2017) differentiate between the following three main groups of factors that hinder a positive socialization of an individual starting from childhood:…”