The old order may be dying, but the shape of a new one is still unclear.
The theme of this issue—After Neoliberalism?—is framed as a single question, but it comprehends a number of related ones. The most obvious is perhaps the hardest to answer: What was, or is, neoliberalism in the first place? Is the word simply a rhetorical plaything of the chattering classes used to describe the principles and policies of political economy guiding many of the world’s most developed nations during the past fifty-odd years? As critics of neoliberalism see it, that orientation has been shared by political leaders not only in the United States (from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and beyond) but also in other nations as radically different in other respects as the United Kingdom (notably during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher), Chile (expressly under Augusto Pinochet), and even China (particularly after Deng Xiaoping’s turn to capitalism with “Chinese characteristics”).
Briefly put, the doctrine behind this orientation—often attributed exclusively to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” of economists—is that those economies are strongest in which markets are freest to operate. Yet the promise of this doctrine, as first put forward by Friedrich Hayek and others associated with the pre–World War II “Walter Lippmann Colloquium” or the postwar Mont Pèlerin Society, extends far beyond mere economics. Indeed, what came to be known as neoliberalism was a set of policy prescriptions (with conservative and progressive variations) formulated largely to address the crisis of democracy that had led to the rise of communism and fascism. The freeing of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by limiting government interventions in the economy, minimizing tariffs and encouraging free trade across nations, enthroning the principle of shareholder value as the greatest good of business corporations, privatizing and deregulating industries—these and other hallmark policies would not only help economies thrive but also moderate social conflicts, preserve and advance individual freedoms and liberal principles in existing democracies, and encourage their adoption in others.
The term neoliberal would come to describe not only a form of political economy but also underlying cultural orientations and values and even a conception of the human person. The ideal utility-maximizing Homo economicus is a fully autonomous individual who assembles lifestyles and even personal identity from an array of commodifiable choices in order to compete and thrive in the increasingly brutal winner-take-all economy, where creative destruction and disruption reign supreme.
However broadly or narrowly the term is understood, there is now growing debate about the enduring viability of the neoliberal consensus, much of it prompted by the fact that the open, free-trading global economy that neoliberals champion appears to be leaving growing numbers of people behind. In response, both under Trump and Biden, long-held policy positions began to shift, as economic nationalism and protectionism challenged porous borders, multilateral practices and institutions, and other shibboleths of a globally oriented economy. Whether nationalist trade practices and national planning designed to build back domestic industries and infrastructure will become the new order of the day remains to be seen. Similarly, neoliberal cultural orientations—including the valorization of hyper-individualism, choice, and personal freedom above all—are themselves coming in for steady criticism from assorted postliberal and other voices.
As well as refining our understanding of neoliberalism, our contributors consider the various ways in which the neoliberal consensus is being challenged from both the right and the left, even as they weigh the likelihood that something substantively different will be born. In “Whose Nationalism?,” for example, political scientist John M. Owen IV provides a brisk overview of past nationalisms to assess the rhetoric and policies of our current crop of nation-first populists. Pointing out that nationalism “has not always been ethnically essentialist or authoritarian,” he notes that there “are much better reasons to be nationalist, perhaps above all because the nation—and not some fanciful cosmopolis—is, as philosopher Yael Tamir argues, where democracy lives.”
While conservatives and progressives appear to agree that neoliberalism has weakened many of our fundamental institutions, their proposed solutions are strikingly different. In “Putting (Some Kind of) Families First,” legal scholar Deborah Dinner explains: “The political right and left share the belief that the past half century’s intensification of private responsibility for social reproduction—the labor and resources necessary to sustain life and reproduce the next generation—has proven disastrous. But they offer dramatically different agendas based on which ‘working families’ they believe government should support and what forms that support should take.”
In their consuming concern with shareholder value, American corporations have contributed not only to economic inequality and the weakening of democracy but also to the decline of their own performance and output. Unfortunately, argues political theorist David Ciepley, “neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, globalization, unrestrained economic concentration, shareholder empowerment, and tax reduction have cleared the way for corporations to concentrate business and wealth even further.” But in “There Are Alternatives: Toward a Stewardship Economy,” he points to other forms of corporate governance, including that of Denmark’s hugely successful enterprise foundations (the Carlsberg Group, Novo Nordisk, and Maersk), to show that “there is a way—a politically realizable and sustainable way—of governing corporations that retains their productivity while more broadly spreading the returns.”
The relationship of neoliberalism to liberalism itself is a subject treated in different, if occasionally overlapping, ways by historian Blake Smith and political scientist James E. Block. In “Just Another Liberalism?” Smith draws on French theorist Michel Foucault’s examination of neoliberalism as a “particular anthropology (an account of what human beings are like),” one different from earlier liberal anthropologies only by its almost exclusive emphasis on “economic man.” Given the resilience of this anthropology, Smith believes that “post-neoliberal” policy directions proposed by both the right and the left will probably fail to achieve their goals. “Many of the policies enacted or proposed in recent years for reorienting America’s economy and society are,” he writes, “squarely within the past half century’s anthropological paradigm. Seeking to shape the incentives of individuals, families, and corporations in ways that align their self-interest with national goals, for example, through reforms aimed at increasing the number of American babies or semiconductors, resembles nothing so much as late-twentieth-century policies widely characterized as neoliberal.”
In “Captives of Desire: Notes on the Making of the Neoliberal Subject, 1880–2025,” Block traces the neoliberal subject to the emergence of the “organization man” in the late nineteenth century and the formation of a “distinctive twentieth-century system called organizational liberalism” that “effectively reduced active democratic citizens to consumers and careerists subject to elite management and direction.” The neoliberal subject was an individual whose priorities had been redirected away from “a religiously inflected mastering of desire in service of higher ends toward the fulfillment of easily accessible appetites…. 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.”
While the loneliness and sterility of a society that reduces all things to market values might be laid to the governing ethos of the neoliberal order, many thinkers see this parlous state of the human condition as the logical outcome of forces and ideas unleashed centuries earlier by the destabilizing effects of reformed—and ever-reforming—Christianity, beginning with the Protestant Reformation. That, at least, is the story that German sociologist Max Weber tells in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—a story that novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson challenges in “The Sum of Our Wisdom: Recovering Calvin’s Truth for a Lonely Age.” Insisting that “the supposed conflation of virtue and godliness with individual prosperity and material flourishing is not what one of the central figures of the Reformation intended,” she goes on to show that “the religious tradition propelled by the Calvinist reformation, which lies in the deep background of our cultural moment, provides a powerful account of the human person and the meaning of human life that stands in contrast to the anemic anthropology on offer today.”
Alert readers will note that this issue introduces a new department, “Reconsiderations.” Its aim is to revisit important texts, ideas, or thinkers that might have been misunderstood, ignored, or forgotten. In our first installment, philosopher Matt Dinan reconsiders Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein a quarter century after its publication.