Neoliberalism, law and nature

Abstract

The chapter unfolds in several sections. The first briefly outlines the growth of the neoliberal state amid the crises faced by capital since the 1970s. The second spells out a few of the specifically legal innovations that have been a part of this evolution, including new regimes of trade, property, investment, rent, environmental governance and legitimized violence. As pressures have grown to reduce state and market to the “identical flat ontology of the neoclassical model of the economy”,2 the section argues, the legal landscape has been flattened too. For example, fines, fees and prices have been conflated in theory and practice and juridical traditions rooted in commons norms increasingly marginalized along with the interests of those who rely on them. New patterns of criminalization and decriminalization have also emerged, together with new understandings and legal treatments of corruption and noncorruption. Growing privatization, meanwhile, has gone hand in hand with an explosion in the volume of written law. This expansion originates in part in imperatives to centralize economic authority on a global scale and to increase the sophistication and opacity of legal trickery in an increasingly rent-based, parasitic, extractive economy, but also in incentives for scammers and reformers alike to resort to the formulation of more written rules to try to further their opposing interests. A third section attempts to make explicit how the development of neoliberal legal regimes and of neoliberal natures are of a piece. As an example, it sketches some of the ways in which neoliberal property, trade, civil and criminal law, as well as the neoliberal flattening of the legal landscape, constitute and are constituted not just by contemporary trends in “human” politics but also by a new global fire regime. A short conclusion then draws some of these threads together, suggesting that researchers and other activists need to make the alliances that will enable them to contend with the mutually-inseparable contradictions of neoliberal law and neoliberal nature together.