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Abstract
Existing interpretations of the current resurgence of austerity discourses tend to attribute this to a failure to learn the lessons of the financial crisis. The picture of a return to neoliberal business-as-usual, however, sits uneasily with the popular discontent and democratic energies unleashed by the crisis. Indeed, in the USA it is precisely the mobilization of populist forces that has been a driving force behind the turn to austerity. The paper seeks to shed light on this paradoxical connection through a selective genealogy of economy that foregrounds its theological content. Economy is conceptualized as a paradoxical logic of governance, capable of organizing authority and belief in a secularized context that rejects the idolatrous worship of mundane signs. Austerity is not merely or primarily a ‘wrong policy’ but an article of faith, holding out a promise of purification that commands considerable ethical appeal and mobilizational capacity.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Other cultural studies contributions in this vein include Giroux (Citation2008) and Fisher (Citation2011).
2. In political economy this is evident in the strong emphasis on the role of intersubjective conceptual schemas and epistemic communities (e.g. Abdelal Citation2009). In social and cultural approaches to economic life a similar problem is apparent in the reliance on an idealist model of performativity (e.g. Mackenzie Citation2006), which depicts norms and rules as operating in quite linear ways. For a critique of such approaches to performativity, see Butler Citation2010.
3. For a classic narrative along these lines, see Heilbroner Citation1953.
4. Leys (Citation1993) traces Mead's shift from a pragmatist, associative conception of the self to a Weberian ontology that laid the foundations for the rise of postwar Parsonian social science.
5. See recent contributions from historians such as McGirr (Citation2002), Boyer (Citation2008) and Moreton (Citation2009).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Martijn Konings
Martijn Konings is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. During the academic year 2015–16 he will be a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of The Development of American Finance (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Emotional Logic of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2015). Along with Melinda Cooper he edits the new book series “Transactions: Critical Studies in Finance, Economy and Theory” for Duke University Press. Address: Department of Political Economy, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.