1. The classic liberal society of participatory institutions, competitive markets, and social mobility, which formerly nurtured and sustained the American belief in individual freedom and opportunity along with popular self-rule, is today scarcely a memory. In its place, the corporate organization of society—expanding for 150 years with its encompassing hierarchies and concentrations of power—recast American society and its popular practices and expectations. Amid the unending acceleration of production and technological innovation, omnipresent merchandisers and round-the-clock digital stimulants cajole and persuade individuals to pursue unprecedented enticements: indulgence in limitless appetitive striving and the pseudo-celebrity of ceaseless self-inflation. Facing an ever more constricting social reality and temptations ever less compatible with the core liberal virtues of moderation and self-restraint, Americans may wonder what is still liberal about their axiomatically liberal society. If the answer is cautionary, where does this leave us? And what options do we have?
2. Growing secularism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was attended by the waning of Protestant religiosity. The resulting emergence of a liberal polity, as conceptualized by John Dewey, the leading thinker of the age, involved a transfer of ultimate authority over the nation’s common ends from Divinity to Society. Accompanying this transition was a shift in the nature of the human role in the world: In place of the Protestant “freedom” to serve God and the godly plan in the way of one’s choosing, so long as authoritatively sanctioned, “freedom” was reconstituted to mesh with liberal precepts. Defined now as members primarily of society, individuals could serve in the ways of their choosing so long as they were within the constraints of liberal ends and norms, as well as designated social practices.
3. The increasingly liberal polity initially extended the nineteenth-century ideal of a culture of democratic, civic, and political participation to the modern era of growing industrialism and urbanism. The corporate sector, a core element of an expanding private and public organizational society, became steadily more dominant as late-century liberalism faced a dilemma: The far-reaching success of the American economy was regarded by industrial and business elites as the realization of organizational priorities advanced through economies of scale and implemented by coordinated planning and administrative hierarchies. At the same time, the era’s mass political movements, including militant labor unions, the Socialist Party, and the Social Gospel movement, driven to demand greater public oversight to contain expanding corporate economic and political power, were seen as an acute threat to systemic efficiency and managerial supervision. This led to a concerted reallocation of political and economic power by private elites and public administrators: Systemic control and decision-making—regarding not only public matters but inevitably, given their broader impact, individual choices as well—shifted from a democratic electoral process to elite administrative bodies and private ownership.
4. The problem posed by this solution was the visible elimination of public oversight and a significant institutional role for citizens presumed to be at the center of the modern liberal project. For the liberal claim of a free society to be sustained, its revolutionary ideal of individual freedom, anchored in popular democracy and effective decision-making by citizens, had to be acknowledged and at least persuasively gestured to.
5. At the end of the nineteenth century, intent on providing a conceptual paradigm adequate to the modern organizational age, organizational sociologists led by pioneering academics such as Lester Ward, Albion Small, Franklin Giddings, and Simon Patten and free-market economists led by John Bates Clark realized the necessity of reconceptualizing freedom. Fully aware of the structural consolidations occurring, they evolved a novel and, in time, broadly paradigm-altering conception that would support the organizational dominance of American society. They turned to a new academic discourse developed by the founders of social psychology to argue that desire was the presumptive source of human motivation. As the wellspring of a person’s primary wishes and needs, desire functioned as the foundation of the will and its exercise of individual choice. Moreover, according to the liberal account of the human subject, desires emerged from within as the manifestation of one’s own personal preferences and priorities, and a life focused on the pursuit of personal wants and interests was therefore by nature voluntary. As a result, rebutting growing doubts regarding the continuing capacity of individuals to direct their own life course, a liberal society devoted to the expression of desires was, by definition, a free society.
6. This academic and yet highly politicized discourse on the role of desire—which became only more persuasive with the growth of consumer society, an increasingly narcissistic culture, and the spread of impulsive and addictive behavior—always contained a fundamental contradiction. While muted to the general public because of its detrimental political implications, impulses and motivations were not regarded by academics and researchers as wholly or even primarily distinctive or unique. Given individual suggestibility and malleability, particularly at early ages, desires were clearly subject to being externally influenced, directed, and even shaped. Liberal thinkers thus boldly and without fear of contradiction insisted that affirming an individual source of desire in the emerging age of vastly expanding mass production and organizational employment ladders would pose no threat to social order. Rather, given the growing demand for status and consumption, consumer behavior and social mobility—though defined as a matter of individual choice—could be effectively directed toward the systemic pursuit of available market options and priorities. Furthermore, supposedly self-interested and even self-serving behavior was structured to serve institutional goals as essentially private and disconnected from significant institutional participation or policy concerns. Such activity could thus be not merely permitted but directly and strenuously encouraged. Such a society, presumably composed of empowered individuals and further bolstered by the liberal inflation of consumer choice as the determining factor in the productive system, would be at once open and insulated from change.
7. This reframing of the individual and its relation to society represented a significant reconfiguration of the liberal paradigm. The result, a distinctive twentieth-century system called organizational liberalism, represented a dramatically attenuated connection to perduring liberal institutions and values. To begin with, this shift effectively reduced active democratic citizens to consumers and careerists subject to elite management and direction. Moreover, by reorienting individual priorities away from a religiously inflected mastering of desire in service of higher ends toward the fulfillment of easily accessible appetites, American liberalism was implicitly acknowledging a turn away from an innovative history of social change and cultural experimentation. The new emphasis on stability, social regularity, privatism, and political complacency directed people away from pursuing new personal and collective aspirations that might challenge the existing system.
8. By grounding the validity of the modern American project in access to personal gratification, liberalism would tether its case for individuality and freedom to continually expanding the pathways to acquisition and fulfillment. At the same time, such an accelerating pursuit of personal objectives, even if directed away from public involvement, was feared by many liberal thinkers and policymakers as an unstable and potentially hazardous foundation for an individualistic social order. Emphasized through the history of both political regimes and political thought—and reaffirmed by Federalist #10—was the threat of anarchy and chaos it posed to political stability. The limited apprehensions of pre–World War II liberalism, as sociologist Robert Nisbet later argued, derived in part from its assumption that earlier cultural norms of the Protestant social ethic remained durable sources of social regulation. A commitment to the larger social good, together with existing limits on material production, would, it was believed, continue to provide effective constraints on appetitive inclinations. Moreover, as the liberal framework grew in prominence during this period, and American intellectuals began to appropriate long-standing English liberal ideas, key thinkers such as John Dewey, in his classic Democracy and Education, emphasized the Lockean notion of the importance of early childhood formation in producing adaptive and regulated individuals.
9. Beset by ideological blinders, American liberalism could not have foreseen the disruptive impact of its turn to another secular English liberal assumption: the post-religious ideal of freedom embraced by Locke and Smith as well as Jefferson in the Declaration. In an increasingly competitive and production-based society, this emerging cultural ideal of freedom from external restraints would weaken the already fraying cultural and institutional disapproval of conspicuous consumption, acquisition, and status seeking. Faced with the boom economy and cultural experimentation of the 1920s, organizational liberals began to sense that more effective controls on individual behavior would be needed. At the same time, to preserve the liberal framework these controls had to appear consistent with not only the popular perception of reduced constraints but also the later organizational-liberal identification of freedom with both the satisfaction of desire and the opportunity to partake in expanding consumption and acquisition.
9.2 To affirm this psychocultural experience of freedom while limiting its actual reality, organizational liberalism, in the period between 1915 and 1950, developed several discourses that, while ostensibly academic, were designed to provide protocols for social adaptation. These complementary discourses within the fields of social psychology, child psychology, educational psychology, education and curriculum, sociology, politics, and even economics were developed to demonstrate that individuals possessed a naturally adaptive character grounded in the intrinsic wish to pursue voluntary social integration. Directly contravening liberal assumptions, these proponents, building on Tocqueville’s psychosocial analysis, sensed that underlying the official view of an independent and self-directing citizenry most people experienced deep anxieties about disconnection and dislocation. Fear of marginalization and isolation in turn provoked an intense but unacknowledged drive to belong. While prevalent in the early republic, this drive—as underscored by Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm—appeared to be heightened in a mobile, dramatically modernizing, and highly competitive society lacking the support of a social safety net and vibrant communal networks.
9.3 With this unease reinforced by the manifestly unrealizable and self-isolating cultural pressure to be self-reliant, the modern individual experienced an intensified need for social connection. Pursuing with plausible deniability a preoccupation with fitting in by complying with group expectations and adopting approved social practices and attitudes, the American was now identified in the disciplines as a natural conformer. Conformity, participating in widely accepted lifestyles and attitudes without necessarily engaging in direct connections with others, was the perfect solution to social integration in a society restricting membership to individual consumption and acquisition. Moreover, it fulfilled the organizational-liberal goal of devaluing social connection that would facilitate opportunities to organize and act collectively.
9.4 At the same time, this bold contention was juxtaposed with the contrary insistence that liberal institutions had a sustained responsibility to shape individuals, beginning in early childhood, for social adaptation. A clear inference can be drawn that the prototype of the natural conformer was designed to conceal this campaign behind the misleading claim of a freely integrated society: The assistance rendered to ensure social assimilation could now be justified as the means by which to satisfy the individual’s deep wish to belong—and to ameliorate widespread anxieties about integration. Promoted as merely preparation for functioning in a free society, comprehensive mechanisms ensuring that the desire to conform was internalized from an early age were developed in family socialization practices, education, counseling, and marketing. So internalized without the knowledge of the individual, this early shaping into conformable practices was inaccessible to the subject: One was thus encouraged to believe (supported by strong cultural suggestion) that these choices and goals originated without external intrusions as the product of their own priorities.
10. Americans embraced the nation’s rise to international ascendancy after World War II as the ultimate validation of the liberal project. Wrapped in its self-declared stature as the ideal modern “free society of free individuals” and the great productive engine of the late industrial age, the country in the late 1940s and 1950s was proclaimed as not only the high point but the culmination of its national experiment. The technological revolution and organizational innovations fostered by great corporations along with a dynamic government partnership, it was asserted, had steered the nation to an unparalleled global combination of wealth and power. Citizens, in turn, now widely affirmed the qualities and capacities they had been socialized into, what sociologist David Riesman called the “other-directed personality,” as their own chosen identity. The result was growing confidence that the postwar socialization of citizens had realized a historic synthesis of unparalleled freedom and unconflicted social adaptation. Organizational liberals, noting the popular sense of national triumph together with a growing access to incentives and rewards, now took for granted that the society, in achieving its anticipated consummation, had vanquished the systemic challenges of earlier eras. Concluding that its processes of social integration could now operate virtually on automatic pilot, many intellectuals, including Louis Hartz, Lionel Trilling, and Daniel Bell, proclaimed the consolidation of a liberal consensus.
10.2 Carried along by the tailwinds of growing affluence and opportunity, as well as the ubiquitous idealizations of American society, few were willing to entertain or even acknowledge the warning signs that were surfacing. Even those attentive to deeper complexities and contradictions—like Erich Fromm, Riesman, Hartz, and, at times, critical analysts like Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, and David Potter—recognized that their unsettling observations would gain little traction. And yet, by the 1950s the presumed merger of personal aspirations and social demands providing Americans the benefits of freedom without complications was being challenged. The much-hyped claim of national realization constituted in the view of these critics little more than wishful thinking, an embellished depiction of as-if free individuals in an as-if freely self-ordering and just society. What was emerging, on examination, was a conventional and inhibited individual constituting and yet only tangentially connected to a distant and lonely crowd. The training to pursue the benefits of consumption and status through hyper-competition and social conformity was in turn producing work-obsessed and automatized role players unable to address their inner unease and repressed aspirations. The resulting neglect of these looming complications, along with the many forms of social injustice and stratification, marginalization, prejudice, and elitism, suggested a society without ideals or moral purpose. The penetrating reflections of the strongest social critics instead captured a growing sense that liberal assumptions were becoming divorced from late-industrial and postindustrial realities: A troubling disconnect between prevailing individual assumptions and understandings, on one hand, and a structurally transformed social reality reconstituting the nature and function of its members, on the other.
11. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the vast successes canonized as the “American Century” encouraged overheated production (as with the onset of the Depression but this time affecting a well-primed populace with access to discretionary income) and mounting consumption. Lacking any sustained goals beyond economic growth and personal accumulation for their own sakes, many Americans, including a large cohort of younger people, began expressing concern about the nation’s future. Throughout the society, distress about enduring social injustice and discomfort with routinized lives in an affluent and self-confident society could no longer be simply obscured or ignored. Value and lifestyle diversity, including engagement in non-material forms of personal and collective commitment, increasingly challenged social conformity with its focus on work and consumption and its standardized culture of self-containment. Rising expectations enabled many marginalized groups to demand reconsideration of the entrenched patterns of social inclusion and exclusion encoded in organizational-liberal structures and priorities. The result was the proliferation of critiques of American social reality that exposed the rhetoric of organizational liberalism as calculatedly disingenuous and self-serving defenses of the status quo.
11.2 Among these forceful challenges to the organizational-liberal settlement, the determination following the American victory in World War II to project global ascendancy involved disseminating liberal institutions and values: Other nations were charged with embracing and implementing the same explicit views on the inevitability of a “free” society that formed the ostensible American creed. Without awareness of the deeper sources of American cohesion behind its ideological assumptions, those efforts to replicate the American dynamic in societies that had no prior connection with individualism were largely unsuccessful. Above all, they failed to account for the submerged anxieties and pressures mobilizing the American drive to belong. As a result, other societies could be offered no mechanisms to counteract the destabilizing impact of a noncoercive and self-integrating ideology without undercutting the liberal claim of freedom. In the process, the early psychosocial preparations for the conformist and assimilative expectations demanded by American socialization were gradually being recognized as important preconditions for liberal individualism, rendering the broader global project unrealistic.
11.3 Possessing far greater impact were the ramifications of the vast acceleration of production after the war. Generating a historically unprecedented, though unequally distributed, level of abundance and affluence, economic growth provided discretionary income and ever-expanding options reaching far into middle-class and blue-collar society. The popular expectations of inevitable privation fueled by age-old economic scarcities and cultural constraints were largely abandoned or dismissed. The liberal claim of persisting limits to appetite—even in a free society, and, even more, one grounded in desire—no longer appeared self-evident. Deprived of a rationale behind the ethos of moderation and limits, organizational liberalism found its central framework instead implicated in the accelerating fragmentation of normative constraints.
11.4 Related to the prior challenges, the student movement and the social movements attendant to the New Left trained their critiques on liberal socialization. American society, despite its putative “preparation for freedom,” was accused of stifling the young in their efforts to find new meanings and forms of expression available with the vast increase of postindustrial options. A broad generational challenge exposed how child rearing constructed a set of barriers and channels directing aspirations and priorities toward social expectations and institutional demands. Early training in habit and attitude formation, as well as the use of resources and markers of success to compel authorized activities and priorities, identified American society as rooted in citizen formation and social discipline. While claiming a greater cultivation of independence than other societies, American socialization, it turned out, was simply deploying a different framing of mandated outcomes. One significant result of this critique of American socialization was a broad cultural movement to reconceptualize the nature of desire: Believed to be truncated and misdirected under liberalism, desire would now be cultivated to facilitate its flourishing into genuine forms of discovery, self-realization, engagement, and commitment. With this ever-expanding focus on individual options and ends, the liberal consensus, with its grounding in Protestant-liberal cultural certitudes, was giving way to normative confusion.
11.5 Fully as significant, historically excluded and socially and economically disempowered groups began to demand a share in the proliferation of opportunities and resources. The notion of a national consensus forged by managerial elites was challenged along with the reigning assumptions about entitlement and the systemic distribution of wealth, power, and status. As the entire society, with its self-vindicating political and moral rationales about equality and opportunity, was implicated in structural injustice, substantial changes were demanded.
11.6 As this extensive set of allegations gave rise to a wide range of critical discourses in the 1970s, a widespread crisis of liberal legitimacy displaced the consensus model across the spectrum of political perspectives. Organizational liberalism, unable to reconstitute its central premises, never recovered.
12. Organizational liberalism could no longer substantiate its central assertions: Absent the consistent internalization of conventional desires and attitudes supporting the claim of a “natural” uniformity of choices, the presumption of predictable behavior among members encouraged to trust their individual inclinations could no longer be ensured; with increasingly conflicting perspectives on society giving the lie to a “natural” desire for inclusion, nominally voluntary social integration was no longer guaranteed. To address the crisis, political and policy elites were compelled to restructure the framework of presuppositions confirming social coherence and cohesion. At the same time, systemic approval of the expanding centrality of appetitive release and expression could not be retracted: Desire was now the remaining link to liberalism grounding both individual choice and the individual’s objectives in society.
12.2 The further revision of organizational society would be called neoliberalism, despite its tenuous relation with historic liberalism. To grasp what is distinctive about neoliberalism, we must understand that the earlier twentieth-century shifts implemented by organizational liberalism had already eliminated or diminished the classical liberal significance of participation, freedom, equality, and individual agency with the goal of providing structural control to the corporations and public bureaucracies. These revisions left only the most incidental connection with an individual role through the identification of consumer choice as the arena for the expression of individual priorities and “citizen” engagement. And yet, as the sole remaining link to systemic authorization, this depleted justification would have to be appropriated in the neoliberal era of overt corporate dominance and its controlling influence over public decision-making. Even as it advanced this justification, however, neoliberalism had to acknowledge the failure of organizational-liberal revisions as inadequate: Just as consumer choice had provided no significant path to individuality or empowerment, dispensing with countervailing socially integrative boundaries and limits failed to secure widespread opportunity. The daunting challenge for neoliberalism, facing rapidly diminishing choice and opportunity in a society that refused restructuring, was to provide a new liberal-adjacent rationale which bolstered the organizational-liberal claims of self-facilitating choice and unfettered opportunity.
13. If the great organizational combines had rendered the individual role virtually negligible, individual agency would have to be reframed for an explicitly corporate-controlled economy. This meant carving out a role for individual desires, preferences, and aspirations consistent with the vast production and distribution entities that possessed, in economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s terms, the power to determine and specify consumer choices as well as employment options and, furthermore, to shape individual desires, incentives, and options from early in life. These larger structural consolidations, short of unforeseen forms of populist reaction, by providing increasing control over the release of desire manifestly threatened to undercut the remaining organizational-liberal claims of personal choice and social advancement. The challenge for this ever-more hierarchical and routinized system, then, would be to defend the presence of enhanced individual prospects in the face of narrowing systemic opportunities.
13.2 The one popular benefit of the emerging neoliberal system (distinguished from the contraction of discretionary income for most people in later decades) was the continual escalation of material output targeted for the satisfaction of optional desires and appetites. Convincing individuals that these choices were their own in an increasingly standardized society, especially after training them to adopt systemic priorities, involved ever-more transparent doublethink, driving the organizational system to fashion its final defense of a voluntarist society: That regardless of decreasing agreement on preferences or the range of options, there was virtual unanimity that more fulfillment was better than less, and a lot more was a lot better.
13.3 Developing a rationale that would provide a persuasive account of individual choice and advancement would employ the cornucopia of highly rationalized and automated postindustrial productivity. Whatever the complexities of an accelerating concentration of power and wealth and, in turn, emerging caste society, the system was committed to fulfilling the popular expectations of ever-increasing consumer consumption and acquisition. Neoliberalism would thus shift from the organizational-liberal anchor in mainstream and conventional forms of desire to the more extreme and problematic anchor in its excess. In depicting the emerging society as a space of unconstrained fulfillment, the new ethos incorporated the boundary-breaking counterculture with its quest for personally derived modes of pleasure, self-display, and self-expression. Transforming its emphasis on creativity and non-material practices into approved forms of superfluous consumption and status seeking, neoliberalism reframed the horizon of desire as at once unlimited and compliant.
14. Neoliberalism, in doubling down on organizational-liberal revisions, had put itself in the position of defending two fundamentally divergent, indeed incommensurable, dynamics: an ever-more administered institutional system and a culture promising endless fulfillment. The hope was that, maintained in equilibrium, each might provide a plausible refutation of the unchecked power and scope of the other. The practical defense of this resolution pointed to the unprecedented popular benefits of a highly integrated system of production: a heightened capacity for research and development, optimal innovation and market research, and a vast scale of output. This advanced organizational complex could thus satisfy individual desires beyond anything that individuals themselves could imagine, generating, in effect, a continual flow of novel and ever-expanding opportunities for indulgence and satiation.
14.2 The problem beyond the near-term improbability of maintaining this equilibrium, which was to become quickly evident, was the longer-term embrace of two guiding principles antithetical to the foundational principles of liberalism. Seeking to sustain its attenuating connection with liberal principles, neoliberalism framed each of its polar constituents in terms suggesting a link with the justifications developed in earlier organizational modifications. Addressing the issue of individual choice, it was unwilling to acknowledge that growing institutional dominance was contributing to a serious decline of not only significant but commonplace options. The largely unspoken but pervasive presumption was that market purchases (akin to voting for predetermined candidates), while the sole remaining role, represented a ratification of corporate foresight and innovation, what Galbraith referred to as corporate planning, including “careful conditioning” to ensure in advance that customers “want this blessing.” This justification had been developed in late liberal political science to assert that tightly bounded electoral choices remained an expression of individual decision-making. The argument advanced was that those unhappy with the candidates always had the option not to vote, though this argument was decidedly more tenuous for everyday consumer necessities.
14.3 Regarding the role of effective social controls, neoliberalism rejected the assessment that the absence of constraints on desire undermined systemic viability: The view that economic dominance through a growing concentration of power and resources also provides great societal leverage regarding other institutions where everything was now for sale had to be minimized. Given that national markets no longer provided either structural or normative constraints on acquisitive behavior or unrestrained accumulation, the benefits of increasingly asymmetrical power and information in an advanced corporate economy were now stressed. Regarding elites, the unconstrained capacity to accumulate and efficiently direct resources was regarded as a necessary precondition for achieving global success in a fiercely competitive international system. This success, which in effect justified immense personal rewards, involved untold benefits to society and to its members. Furthermore, despite the paucity of constraints within internal economic competition, the claim of market discipline lingered: The demonstrably false assumption—even ignoring inherited wealth—was that the demanding world of corporate competition represented, at a more rarefied level, a strenuous and risky arena which limited the direct power that could be exercised in other institutional spheres.
14.4 Considering the role of the general populace, neoliberalism, misdirecting popular expectations to obscure consolidating social hierarchies and a growing sense that many things were no longer within reach, turned to the excitement and pleasure of self-performativity. New forms of self-creation beyond narrow instrumental roles enabled one to explore and exhibit the many dimensions of personal experience and appeal that stirred intimations of a post-work culture. Self-display, status, influence, celebrity or celebrity-adjacent positioning, gaming success, social-media popularity, and quotability were portrayed as limitless in potential. Released from cultural or moral limits on self-aggrandizing behavior, one required less discretionary income than the cunning and commitment to garner audiences and mainstream or subcultural visibility.
14.5 Consumption was thus redefined by neoliberal corporate and cultural influencers: The earlier dynamic, rooted in conformity and the wish to belong by achieving conventional goals in a socially acceptable manner, was reshaped as the far more expansive and unchecked drive toward varieties of self-inflation. The message of the marketing system has been that previous demands for self-denial and self-containment, along with restrictions on self-display, had been decisively checked. Through a targeted and pandering advertising outreach, the populace was invited to the prospect of unbounded self-aggrandizement. Any individual was now able, through an ingenious campaign of presentation along with lifestyle novelty and consumer acumen, to mobilize cultural appeal and social success. Consumers were further encouraged to believe that these ambitions could be honed at the frontier of technological advances often developed and deployed for this purpose. The vast tech networks offering platforms for conspicuous expression and performance in the online and social-media and gaming worlds offered the promise that expansive public acceptance and influence were attainable by all who “aspired” beyond the ordinary.
15. Whether or not the polarizing forces at the center of neoliberalism could remain in equilibrium, neither systemic hyper-control nor psychosocial excess was liberal. Organizational liberalism was already at odds with classic liberal values, but its culture retained a strong investment in greater equity and inclusion, which would be drawn on symbolically to mobilize more just policies, if not structural changes. Neoliberalism, by contrast, represents a stage in social formation that is no more liberal than a Hail Mary pass in football is a form of prayer.
15.2 Structurally drawing on the 1950s slogan that “What is good for GM is good for America,” neoliberalism has become a pretext for elite power meant to obscure the consolidation of corporate control and vast differences in wealth and opportunity. The no-longer competitive market system, featuring diminishing opportunities for market entrance, for social mobility, and for economic security, was now a euphemism featuring the extensive elite management of the consumer and productive realms, as well as its shaping of consumer and citizen attitudes. The dramatic decline in freedom and choice has been evident in the increasing marketing and social-science capacity to predict the behavior of members of society. At the same time, the ever-growing divergence in wealth has pointed toward a hardening caste society, closer in configuration to traditional estates. With these accumulating structural trends, neoliberalism had become an illiberal development incompatible with classic beliefs about economic competition, accessible political arenas, and social opportunity.
15.3 Psychologically and culturally now dependent on the popular striving for excess, neoliberalism has dismantled the core dynamic of the liberal project. Emerging with the alarming rise of individualism in the seventeenth century, liberalism had based its cautionary reconstruction of social order on addressing this novel challenge: The task was securing social unity in the face of individuals embracing the pursuit of their own agendas. How could those assuming the entitlement to indulge with few external limits on their desires and the superior right to advance their priorities avoid triggering a nightmarish war of all against all? At the same time, how could nonnegotiable limits regulating the dangers of excess be imposed without violating the emerging demand for self-rule? Hobbes’s genius was to identify a free citizenry as one whose limits were self-imposed: By dramatizing the catastrophic consequences that would follow the unregulated release of desire, Hobbes mobilized a common commitment to security through willing self-containment as the anchor of a stable polity. Restraining personal ambitions and appetites within the bounds of societal acceptability thus became the foundation for an ethos of self-restraint, moderation, and social adaptability. Excess, while lurking in the mandate to pursue self-interest within organizational liberalism, was restrained by remaining material limits and social norms. In neoliberalism, however, the fantasy of sustained excess, in effect a return of the Hobbesian nightmare, was now the authorized aspiration. The improbable and foolhardy assumption, evident in expanding political extremism and ethical nihilism, was that excess, if instructed to use the given avenues of expression and consumption, would be without consequences.
16. More immediate than the neoliberal problem with legitimacy, even if now hanging by its branding, was the tenuousness of its equilibrium: Both systemic hyper-control and psychosocial excess were accelerating and becoming uncontainable. As the structural dynamic of organizational mergers and diversification followed the well-known course of late-capitalist consolidation, the counter of cultural distraction and co-optation was to ratchet up the diversion of genuine individuality into blind alleys of hyper-self-inflation and personal celebrity (though rooted in the conformist habits that had never been overcome). Obscured by the cultural pressure to pursue curated images of fantasized self-realization and insubstantial distinction from recognizing the tightening constrictions, the result was a hyper-competitive market of alpha winners and endless wannabes paralleling the economic order. Producing pervasive insecurity, envy, and lack of fulfillment, this all-consuming market in personality and style generates an ever more excessive pursuit of notoriety, ever more destabilizing, self-disordering and unsustainable social behavior: serial substitutions of personas to mask the lack of access to a genuinely developed identity and authentic desire; escalating expressions of compensatory self-aggrandizement to disguise perceived inadequacies regarding self-worth and selfhood in trappings of superiority. Elites and celebrities have been acting out their own delusions of successful lives, indulging in obscene wealth and display justified by reference to popular attitudes and aspirations. A further result as overcompensation has become the cultural currency is the empty posturing of connectedness in an increasingly anomic, disconnected, and lonely society: not only the collecting of online friends and followers but the ephemeral experience of companionship, explored by Sherry Turkle in Alone Together (2011) and others, employing both real and virtual identities in proliferating online communities, virtual-reality communities, gaming communities, community platforms and forums, VR dating, VR chat, and VR friends.
16.2 This ultimate shrinking of the American Dream of endless possibility to a temporary rush from wishful self-glorification and popularity has ushered in a populace simultaneously recognizing and avoiding its fate: caught in the social-psychological dynamic of addiction and habituation, frenetically seeking the limelight and privileged status from the latest fad or rage, craving amnesia from each deflation of illusions with a dose of Morpheus’s blue pill of willed ignorance, afraid despite knowing the futility to rouse themselves.
17. As these structural consolidations and psychosocial maladjustments reveal a society no longer in contact with its historic promise, we must ask where the failure of neoliberalism and the larger crisis of liberalism have left us. Neoliberalism, emblem of the attenuation and decline of the liberal system, now emerges as a brief phase in the arc of the four-century Protestant-liberal project, one of the commanding achievements in the history of the West. The turn in the early twentieth century to the dynamic of individual desire as a substitute for genuine individuality, connection, and empowerment turned out to shield the populace from the realities of ever-expanding organizational control. The result was what historian Daniel Boorstin called a world of images that enclosed Americans in a manipulated shroud of marketized fantasies oblivious to the real issues and challenges we face.
18. To recover our grip on the future, we must pose difficult questions about what will come after neoliberalism (and perhaps liberalism, too). What is the plausibility of rescuing the liberal subject and liberal (rather than post-liberal) communities of meaning, particularly absent the structural and psychosocial pillars of its classical foundation? Given that self-deferring (and self-sublimating) motivations have been excised by the twentieth-century liberal conflation of desire and self-interest, does one remedy lie in systems and cosmologies of mandatory self-deferral predating the liberal age? To what extent do the answers lie in the reorientation of the structures of desire that we are currently acculturated into, providing paths to new forms of self- and collective actualization? What resources might be identified in the wider culture to generate new norms and ideals facilitating enhanced forms of individuality and collective self-rule? And what in turn are possible signs and portents of such a coming transitional era?
19. Because society faces a great range of perspectives and deep divisions regarding these complex and troubling questions, a thoughtful assessment of these options lies beyond the scope of the present essay. Many liberal commentators, devoted to a credulous depiction of the United States as the final chapter in Western history, avoid—even while sensing collapse—addressing the crisis of social renewal. Yet as we wrestle with the great advances of the modern and late-modern age, solutions will emerge for humanizing these unprecedented opportunities. The challenge is to ask how society can restore belief in and support for forms of desire that promise genuine meaning for all. How do we achieve personal actualization and empowerment, interpersonal relatedness and communal connection, and equitable norms and facilitative institutions after a century of individual and citizen dispossession and social fragmentation?