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.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• states
• households
• markets
• science
• framing gestures

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of the article were presented at the 2017 conferences organized by the European Sociological Association in Athens and the European International Studies Association in Barcelona. Additionally, preliminary forms of the argument were presented as seminar talks in 2017 at the universities of Manchester and Nottingham. Many thanks to all of those who asked questions and provided feedback, especially Cemal Burak Tansel, and to the referees for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Synonymic terms such as ‘competitive markets’ or simply ‘the market’ perform the same function as ‘free markets’ in neoliberal texts. As noted in the section ‘Remaking states and households’ in this article, neoliberal texts make their claims about ‘free markets’ in terms of negation – i.e. the need to eliminate undesirable interference in otherwise naturally occurring market processes. As such, the function performed by the literary device ‘free markets’ extends to similar terms invoked to make the same points about negating unnatural interferences. See also Bruff (in press).

2. An ostensibly similar argument has been made by Melinda Cooper. However, there are two key differences between her and our position: (i) Cooper argues that during the 1960s and 1970s neoliberal intellectuals ‘refined and in some cases utterly revised their founding concepts’ in response to various social upheavals (2017, p. 18), which skips over the canonical works we consider of such importance for neoliberalism’s subsequent trajectory; (ii) while she is correct to point to the growing political alliance between (economic) neoliberalism and (social) neoconservatism from the 1970s onwards, the intellectual and philosophical basis for such an alliance had always been immanent to neoliberalism (as this article shows).

3. For reasons of space, this article does not address the ordoliberal strand of neoliberal thought. Nevertheless, the argument found in this article implicitly addresses a key thread within literatures on neoliberalism, namely ordoliberalism’s possible incompatibilities with the Austrian and Chicago forms of neoliberalism due to its explicit recognition of the state’s role in the constitution and functioning of markets. It is hopefully clear that, rather than asking whether ordoliberalism can be considered neoliberal or not, we ought to acknowledge that all significant strands of neoliberal thought envision crucial roles for states and households in the constitution of markets in capitalism. Ordoliberals are simply more explicit about states in particular compared to scholars such as Hayek and Friedman.

4. This includes the work of one of us, who has written extensively on neoliberalism. For instance, Bruff (2014) discusses ‘social’ institutions of governance such as collective bargaining in the workplace, political parties and welfare states, all of which could be understood as ‘public’ societal sites. While these institutions often have dense and multi-faceted connections with ‘private’ sites such as households – especially regarding workfarism – it is only more recently that an explicit discussion of households became visible in his work (Bruff & Wöhl, 2016). Nevertheless, the argument in the 2014 article ‘nonmarket areas of social life took on a particularly important role in neoliberal ideology’ (p. 114) facilitated the extension of the initial discussion to households. See also Koch (2018) on state coercion and localized forms of social struggle, especially around housing.

5. The reader will start to notice the repetition of a few key phrases and points. This is deliberate, for it maximizes the potential of our focus on the articulation and organization of language in neoliberal texts. It also permits the use of repetition in our own articulation and organization of language, as a means of showing what the implications are of our interrogation of neoliberal texts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Bruff

Notes on contributors

Ian Bruff is Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. He has published widely on capitalist diversity, European capitalisms, neoliberalism, and social theory. He is currently researching the foundations of neoliberal thought, and is the Managing Editor of the Transforming capitalism book series published by Rowman & Littlefield International.

Kathryn Starnes

Kathryn Starnes is Lecturer in International Relations at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is currently researching IR narratives via postcolonial approaches to Gothic literature to explore practices of epistemic violence. She has published Fairy tales and international relations: A folklorist reading of IR textbooks (Routledge, 2016).