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Abstract
As a policy measure that provided $700 billion in funding for imperiled Wall Street institutions, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) was framed by its detractors as a continuation of neoliberalism rather than an authentic act of interventionism rooted in the macroeconomic philosophy of Keynesianism. Its proponents crafted EESA as an anomalous but necessary state intervention into an otherwise well-functioning free market. This essay analyzes these opposing arguments—focusing specifically on the state of exception warrants we call historical expediency and moral critique—to show how each position operates within the political rationality of neoliberal governmentality. We maintain that whether constructing the financial crisis as an historical glitch or as an administrative failure, both sides of the debate rely on warrants of exceptionialism, inflected through technical solutions, that circumvent possibilities for a more dynamic and transformative conversation grounded in a rhetoric of the common.
