Martijn Konings and Adam Kotsko Discuss Neoliberalism
Stanford University Press is proud to present the first part of a conversation between Martijn Konings, author of Capital and Time, and Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism's Demons.
Adam Kotsko:
I have just finished your very interesting book, and I think we have much to discuss. When you suggested this conversation, you mentioned disagreements—and I am sure we will find plenty of those—but my first impression is that there is a certain homology between our projects. Fundamentally, we are both responding to simplistic and ineffective critiques of neoliberalism by trying to discern how neoliberalism makes sense on its own terms.
Martijn Konings:
To kick this off, let me just start with two questions:
I’d first like to ask you to explain a bit more why you feel the Trump presidency is so obviously an expression of neoliberalism’s decline. You rely on Davies’s understanding and periodization of neoliberalism, which I feel over-identifies the essence of neoliberalism with the kind of rationalization of economic governance through things like “new public management” under Third Way regimes and sees the Trump regime as too “irrational” to qualify as neoliberal. To my mind, such a perspective remains too rooted in a concern with rational-discursive legitimation and does not fully register the affective aspect of political mobilization in a deeper way.
I get a lot out of your emphasis on the persistent force of political theology. But to my mind, it leaves a certain ambiguity. Does that persistence mean that political theology should be taken as an explanatory template? Or is the point that we should step up our efforts to criticize the theological from a more committed secular perspective?
Adam Kotsko:
Neoliberalism is not necessarily in decline in practice. Trump's deviation from neoliberal "best practices" have been fairly marginal, and they tend to occur in the areas that Republicans are most willing to push back on. And globally speaking, few of the so-called "populist" leaders seem to have much interest in breaking with the market-based economy or moving toward more state-led models. This fits with what I say about Trump as a parody or heretic within the neoliberal framework rather than a break—and sometimes heresies can become respectable alternate versions! Look what happened with the heresy of Lutheranism within Christianity, for example. I can see what you mean when you say I identify the 90s version of neoliberalism as normative in a typological sense—but it is far from the only version of neoliberalism that has been concerned with discursive legitimation. If anything, the combative neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher were even more concerned with legitimating themselves, simply because they were proposing radical changes. What's so puzzling in our moment, I think, is that the remaining "classic" neoliberals (moderate Democrats, Blairites, etc.) no longer have any real popular purchase, and the right-wing reaction legitimates itself—misleadingly, as usual—by distancing itself from the neoliberal policies it mostly continues to pursue. Neoliberalism as a principle of legitimation is on the decline, then, and I don't know how long it can go on like that.
On the question of political theology, I realize this is an area where many secular readers may experience some "static” from my book. In the broad sense in which I am describing political theology as a study of systems of legitimation, I don't think it is possible to get out of it. We can get out of Carl Schmitt-style, sovereignty-based political theology, and we can certainly have secular models of legitimation (and hence of "political theology" if you can tolerate the apparent paradox). I am not very interested in the religious/secular distinction; I would define the desirable future model in different terms—as more democratic, as characterized by more direct control over production rather than the "outsourcing" of responsibility to quasi-transcendent sources (whether it be the "secular" market or "religious" divine providence, both of which are implied by the invisible hand metaphor). That’s why, at the end of the book, I call for something like a political theology after the death of God. Why do I continue to use the "religious" language despite the potential for misunderstanding and the apparent paradoxes that arise? Above all, I want to emphasize the genealogical aspect of political theological inquiry and the fact that we are all caught up in histories that we might not have chosen but still have to deal with. Too often, modern European thinkers have believed that they have gotten rid of God, only to reintroduce him through the back door. By foregrounding theological language, perhaps we can be more attentive and avoid making the same mistake.
I notice that your book does not contain much consideration of the right-wing reaction at all. Do you simply regard it as continuous with neoliberalism? Did you feel it fell outside the remit of your argument? Or was there some other reason that you didn't address it? I think that some kind of reckoning with the post-2016 world will be expected of most scholarly accounts of neoliberalism going forward.
Martijn Konings:
Let me address your first reply and your question together. It’s certainly true that I don’t address the right-wing reaction of the past years in any detail. But I think it’s there, structurally speaking, in the sense that I see the current right-wing reaction as a structural feature of the logic through which neoliberalism has always worked (with Goldwater, Reagan, Bush, Jr, and Trump all mobilizing very similar sentiments to very similar ends). As you point out, populist right-wing leaders may have seized on some of the fallout of neoliberal restructuring, but they hardly seem to be interested in pursuing substantially different policies. Still, I’m not sure we should account for this in terms of the discrepancy between neoliberalism as ideology and neoliberalism as practice, with the former under pressure and the latter persisting, somewhat against the odds and with increasingly thin support. I think it just means that neoliberalism has a unique capacity to roll challenges to its mode of operation into its mode of operation. The “rationalized” model of neoliberalism as depoliticized economic governance isn’t able to come to terms with the element of vitality or resiliency at work here. It doesn’t really allow us to understand how democracy is deeply implicated in the logic of neoliberalism. In other words, what I try to get away from is the tendency to see reactionary passions and religious fervour as somehow external the logic of neoliberalism.
I made that argument in my previous book, where I argued that neoliberalism can be understood as leveraging off the logic of iconoclasm, i.e., the violent rejection of certain institutions that quickly reinstates symbols that look suspiciously similar. Neoliberalism brings this logic home, so to speak: it can literally look at the very same symbol (a sociopathic robber baron, for instance) as both the problem and the solution. To my mind that’s the very contemporary lesson of Mondzain’s book Image, Icon, Economy, which you mention in passing.
In Capital and Time I rely on Hayek to decode this strange logic, foregrounding the paradoxical way in which he combines an emphasis on absolute contingency with a firm belief in the possibility of neutral institutions that organize an orderly market. Hayek fully and unconditionally accepts our secular condition, the absence of any sort of guarantees, while immediately reinstating belief in some kind of ordering, redemptive arrangement. (Far too many commentators see this as some kind of naïve contradiction at the heart of Hayek’s work, but I think it points to a tension that operates “out there” and is very powerful). This works in counterfactual fashion: the fantasy of a just order draws strength from the fact that there is always corruption to be observed in the actually existing market order. Such logic has been an extremely powerful weapon for inciting populist outrage, and it’s something that neoliberals have been adept at using to advance their project: whatever the problem, the answer is always to restore a true market order. There’s an element of unbelievable tenacity here.
In terms of political theology, in one way, your response makes lot of sense: given the many thinkers who claimed or thought that they had left God behind only to have him linger or return in some unobserved way, there is a lot to be said for recognizing that this is just the legacy we inherit. But I feel it leaves a certain ambiguity. Is it possible that we would thus stop seeing theology as a problem or give up too easily on a critique that would be fully secular? Perhaps I find the idea of political theology useful as a way to describe the predicament in which we’re inevitably stuck but potentially misleading when it comes to explaining how we should relate to that predicament. We may not be able to exist outside the theological, but to my mind, that only heightens the importance of emphasizing that invocations of external authority are always problematic and must be resisted.
Read Part 2 of Between Political Economy and Political Theology »
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