Neoliberalism Reloaded by Matías Saidel

Author:Matías Saidel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2023-02-28T17:30:12.314000+00:00

4.1.2

The authoritarianism inherent to neoliberal rationality

After carrying out one of the most exhaustive genealogies of neoliberal governmental rationality, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval analyze current neoliberalism, studying the characteristics of the neoliberal homo economicus and the disciplinary and violent modalities by which it is produced. In addition to showing that neoliberal rationality has been anti-democratic from its beginnings, in the last five years they have observed that current neoliberalism is undermining the rule of law itself. However, as we have already pointed out, the authors stress that this authoritarian character of neoliberalism should not be confused with the rise of the new far right, which in any case is a drift enabled by it.

For Dardot and Laval, current neoliberalism, as a system of power that governs our lives, secretes a political form that combines anti-democratic authoritarianism, economic nationalism, and expanded capitalist rationality (Dardot et al., 2021). Such a situation derives from a crisis of liberal-social democracy produced after four decades of neoliberalization that led the losers of the competitive order to take refuge in a far right that has been able to echo this resentment. Taking advantage of this situation and the crisis of liberal-social democracy that it has provoked and continues to aggravate, the new neoliberalism radicalizes the war against the population and the domination of capital over society.

While it is true that leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau, have continued to defend, at least verbally, human rights, division of powers, tolerance and equality before the law that the radical right openly questions, Macron himself, who claims to be the defender of liberal democracy and the republic against the threat of Rassemblement National, has not hesitated to implement a strongly repressive “corporate Bonapartism”. In this sense, the economic and police war waged by neoliberalism against liberal-social democracy does not occur within the framework of a permanent state of exception (Agamben, 2003), but begins to form part of the new state of legality (Harcourt, 2018), emptying democracy and the rule of law from within. (Dardot & Laval, 2016)

From such emptying, and from the discontent generated by recurrent crises and their neoliberal solutions—and the absence of a leftist alternative (Bruff, 2013)—a radical right gains strength, which does not hesitate to appeal to the hatred of the immigrant, the poor, women, transgender people, etc. as a way to mobilize the electorate and to impose its ideology.

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