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Abstract
In this paper I suggest that we might understand some features of contemporary populism by reworking the concept of ‘authoritarian populism’ first proposed by Stuart Hall in his analysis of ‘Thatcherism’. Following a brief review of my earlier analytics of ‘governing through freedom’, I suggest that while the political movements identified by the names of Trump, Wilders, Le Pen, the Austrian Freedom Party, the True Finns etc. may be ephemeral, it is worth considering whether they are beginning to articulate a new set of rationalities and technologies for governing ‘after neoliberalism’. I analyse some key elements of these movements, the new epistemologies that they employ and the ethopolitics that they espouse, and suggest that the key operative concepts may be ‘the people’, security and control. We may still be ‘birds on the wire’ as Leonard Cohen once put it, but perhaps what we are enjoined to seek in these strategies for ‘governing liberty’ is not so much freedom but security.
Acknowledgements
This paper was prepared as a talk for a conference on ‘Freedom after neoliberalism’ held at York University in the United Kingdom in June 2017 – this is the reason I revisited my earlier work on freedom. Thanks to Dr Adam Kelly and Dr Alex Beaumont for inviting me, and Harriet Neal for assistance with logistics. I have made some revisions in the light of very helpful comments from those who attended, and from the editors of Economy and Society, but have followed their advice and kept the style of a spoken talk, and kept references to a minimum. The title mystified many. Did I not realize, someone remarked, that we live in a wireless world? But for those who, like me, grew up with Leonard Cohen’s voice, I hope the sense will become clear: I chose it on the day his death was announced.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsVxEZNIJpI
2 I discuss my reasons for preferring this term in Powers of freedom (Rose, Citation1999b): in part this was because the strategies that emerged from the mid-1980s onwards were heterogeneous, certainly not a ‘realization’ of the ideas of neoliberals, and incorporated many elements from radically different political rationalities. Markets remain regulated, governments remain interventionist, technologies for governing have been invented – for example, those involving ‘governing through communities’ (Rose, Citation1996) – which were never dreamed of by any of the original neoliberals, nor by the Chicago economists, or by proponents of the ‘Washington Consensus’. Rajesh Venugopal has provided an excellent recent critical analysis (Venugopal, Citation2015). My reservations remain, despite some critics feeling vindicated by the fact that the International Monetary Fund has recently published a paper that uses this very term to characterize a rather more limited set of policies – ‘increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition [and] a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt’ and to argue that some of the effects of these policies, such as increased inequality, are actually inimical to growth and should be addressed by policy makers (Ostry et al., Citation2016, p. 38) – see https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world.
3 There is, of course, a very long debate in political philosophy about the history and meaning of freedom. My concern, however, is with what one might term the ‘operative philosophy’ of rationalities and strategies for the conduct of conduct. While these sometimes draw upon elements of these debates, they never merely ‘express’ them, and are never reducible to them.
4 We could probably add Turkey’s Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party to this list, though the idea of liberty seems rather foreign to him. Justice, however, as Thomas Osborne has pointed out, is indeed a recurrent theme in populist discourse – and all sorts of authoritarian measures are often justified in the name of justice for those who have been denied justice, while, at the same time, those very populists are often accused of subverting justice.
5 This was the title of the conference at which I was speaking, hence the quote marks.
6 When I was working on this issue, I was particularly struck by Hayek’s discussion in the third volume of Law, legislation and liberty: The political order of a free people: ‘Man has not developed in freedom … Freedom is an artifact of civilisation … Freedom was made possible by the gradual evolution of the discipline of civilization which is at the same time the discipline of freedom’ (Hayek, Citation1979, p. 163).
7 In this context it is interesting to note the rise of the ‘psy’ professions in China, and the development of what some have termed ‘therapeutic governance’ (Yang, Citation2015; Zhang, Citation2017a, Citation2017b).
8 Since I wrote the lecture on which this paper is based, Economy and Society has published a number of ‘deflationary’ analyses of populism (Molyneux & Osborne, Citation2017; Thompson, Citation2017). While I have learned a lot from these discussions, as will be seen, I take a rather different approach, and have maintained the original argument in my lecture here.
10 The full speech is available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/theresa-mays-conference-speech-in-full/.
11 This was a rather infamous headline in the Daily Mail on 22 August 2017, over an article expressing ‘Fury over “out of touch” judges who have “declared war on democracy” by defying 17.4m Brexit voters and who could trigger constitutional crisis’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3903436/Enemies-people-Fury-touch-judges-defied-17-4m-Brexit-voters-trigger-constitutional-crisis.html).
12 Although he did not quite put it in these terms, this was the message of Donald Trump’s campaign speech at Liberty University in May 2017 (http://time.com/4778240/donald-trump-liberty-university-speech-transcript/).
14 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10731266/My-six-months-with-normal-Nigel-Farage.html. Farage’s UK Independent Party is described by some as an ultra-libertarian party, but of course ‘libertarianism’ has as many shapes as populism; Farage’s own ideas about liberty can be gleaned from articles such as this one in The Telegraph in March 2014.
15 Some excerpts from Wilders’ speeches can be found at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Geert_Wilders.
17 Despite Trump making so much of his pledge to ‘build that wall’ in his campaign, a lot of the US–Mexico border is already walled or fenced (over one-third of the nearly 2,000 miles). The barrier was enhanced under both the Bush presidencies, under President Clinton, and much of the fencing was actually installed during Obama’s presidency, under the Secure Fence Act, 2006, signed by George W. Bush. That seems to be fact, not fake news.
18 This phrase is often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, but may, or may not, come from a speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society made by the American Abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips on 28 January 1852 (http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/01/eternal-vigilance-is-price-of-liberty.html).
19 The reference is to a remark made by Ffrancon Roberts in relation to the use of the word ‘stress'.
20 For instance, neither French nor German has this distinction. In her compelling scholarly discussion of the etymology of the two terms, Pitkin also takes her distance from Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the relations of freedom and liberty.
21 Hence, of course, the argument that one sees again and again in colonial discourse, and in debates over the liberation of slaves, that some are incapable of these forms of self-government, and so are ill-suited for life at liberty.
22 Thanks to Diana Rose for suggesting this formulation.
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Nikolas Rose
Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King's College London.