How neoliberal governments neutralize democracy by treating citizens as a set of social enemies
Why do neoliberal policies continue to be implemented and supported by electoral majorities, despite their obvious economic failures and the ever-increasing tensions they produce in society?
To understand this, we need to reread the history of neoliberalism less from the point of view of its economic recipes than of the construction of its political strategy to achieve power.
From Hayek to Thatcher and Pinochet, from Mises to Trump and Bolsonaro, and from Lippmann to Macron, neoliberals have drawn on ideology, constitutional economics, labor discipline, cultural wars as well as police and military force to prevent popular resistance from organizing. And whatever their doctrinal differences, they all see the state's tight control of democracy as the most effective means of defeating egalitarian alternatives.
Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” was not a historical statement, but the strategic objective of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can therefore persevere today by its ability to defeat its opponents while deepening social and cultural regression.
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A trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet. The Choice of Civil War breaks with antiseptic images of neoliberalism as the production of docile subjects or the marketization of everyday life, revealing it as the theory and practice of class warfare. -- Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis
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TURNING CITIZENS INTO ENEMIES, NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTS HAMSTRING DEMOCRACY
Pierre Sauvêtre is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He works on Michel Foucault, Murray Bookchin, the commons and communalism. He is the author of Murray Bookchin et l'objectif communocène, Paris, L'Atelier, 2024.
Haud Guéguen is a philosopher at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in Paris. She works on the epistemology of the possible in the social sciences and the genealogy of neoliberal anthropology. She is the author, with Laurent Jeanpierre, of La perspective du possible, Paris, La Découverte, 2022.
Christian Laval is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He has worked on the genealogy of utilitarianism, the history of sociology, the thought of Marx and neoliberalism and education. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval jointly published The New Way of the World and Never Ending Nightmare.
Pierre Sauvêtre is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He works on Michel Foucault, Murray Bookchin, the commons and communalism. He is the author of Foucault, Paris, Ellipses, 2017.
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