Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Principles of Neoliberalism

Some of these strike me as too absurd (e.g., 7, 9) to bother refuting:

  1. "...contrary to classical liberal doctrine, [the neoliberal] vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the conditions for its existence must be constructed and will not come about 'naturally' in the absence of concerted political effort and organization...
  2. ...'the market' is posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentialy patterned on brain/computational metaphors... The market always surpasses the state's ability to process information...
  3. ...for purposes of public understanding and sloganeering, market society must be treated as a 'natural' and inexorable state of humankind...
  4. A primary ambition of the neoliberal project is to redefine the shape and functions of the state, not to destroy it...
  5. ...Neoliberals treat... politics as if it were a market and promoting an economic theory of democracy...
  6. Neoliberals extol freedom as trumping all other virtues, but the definition of freedom is recoded and heavily edited within their framework... Freedom can only be 'negative' for neoliberals (in the sense of Isaiah Berlin)...
  7. ...capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders. (The free flow of labor enjoys no similar right.)...
  8. ...pronounced inequality of economic resources and political rights [is] not ... an unfortunate by-product of capitalism, but as a necessary functional characteristic of their ideal market system...
  9. Corporations can do no wrong, or at least they are not be blamed if they do...
  10. The market (suitably reengineered and promoted) can always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the first place...
  11. The neoliberals have struggled from the outset to make their political/economic theories do dual service as a moral code..."
-- Philip Mirowski, "Postface", in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press (2009)
(I've miscategorized this post since neoliberalism encompasses more than economics.)

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