Neoliberalism and Right-wing Populism: Conceptual Analogies

Abstract

The paper compares neoliberal market-fundamentalism and right-wing populism on the basis of its core patterns of thinking and reasoning. Hence we offer an analysis of the work of important founders of market-fundamental economic thinking (particularly von Mises) and an established definition of populism (demonstrated by the example of arguments brought forward by leading populists, like Trump). In doing so, we highlight conceptual resemblances of these two approaches: Both assume a dually divided world that is split into only two countervailing parts. Right-wing populism shows a society split into two groups, fighting against each other. In a similar vein, neoliberal market-fundamentalists argue that there are only two possible countervailing economic and societal orders. We argue that the categorical analogies between neoliberal market-fundamentalism and right-wing populism could provide the basis for a new form of authoritarian neoliberalism.

Keywords:

• right-wing populism
• market-fundamentalism
• Ludwig von Mises
• Donald Trump
• patterns of thinking

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants of the ASE sessions at the ASSA 2018 in Philadelphia as well as two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

Notes

¹ Jost (2006) and more recently Wrenn (2014) showed that the neoliberal era of the last decades as a period of heightened uncertainty and anxiety made individuals more responsive for right-wing conservative policies.

² Mirowski was heavily criticized for his work on the history of neoliberalism as a thought collective and a political movement, which lead him to denote neoliberalism as “The Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name” (Mirowski, 2014). We nevertheless use Mirowski as a starting point as we focus our analysis on the common conceptual ground of neoliberal reasoning, where the MPS still provides the central organizational and institutional core. Furthermore, in contrast to Mirowski we explicitly refer to Fleck’s concept of a thought collective, where he argues that a commonly shared collective thought is an essential condition for its cohesion.

³ Von Mises (1949/1996, p. 237) stresses that “the imaginary constructions of praxeology can never be confronted with any experience of things external and can never be appraised from the point of view of such experience.”.

⁴ Bruff (2014, p. 116) for instance stresses that in authoritarian neoliberalism dominant social groups forcing “the explicit exclusion and marginalization of subordinate social groups through constitutionally and legally engineered self-disempowerment of nominally democratic institutions, governments and parliaments”.