The revolution will not be theorized: Neoliberal thought and the problem of transition

IF 1.2 Q3 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Thomas Biebricher
{"title":"The revolution will not be theorized: Neoliberal thought and the problem of transition","authors":"Thomas Biebricher","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12713","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Neoliberalism is a notoriously contested term, and even among those who principally subscribe to it, which is mostly its critics, fierce debates persist over its nature, how to study it properly—and whether it is still the appropriate conceptual armament to understand the contemporary world and an arguably emerging “post-neoliberalism” (Davies & Gane, 2021). Not only is it controversial how neoliberalism should be defined—a governing rationality in the spirit of Foucault's governmentality lectures (Foucault, 2008), a portfolio of certain policies, or a strategy of transnational capital to restore and safeguard profit rates (Harvey, 2005)—but also on what level to study it, either that of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Cahill, 2014), a set of theories and arguments, or both. My starting point and focus for most of this paper is neoliberal thought as it is represented by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, the German ordoliberals, and, importantly, James Buchanan. My aim is to develop a critical account of neoliberal thought that will abstain from explicitly normative criticisms and rather opt for a more indirect but effective and somewhat novel critique that holds neoliberalism to its own standards and shows how it fails to meet them or is pushed into adopting highly questionable positions in the attempt to do so. The argument proceeds as follows: As already suggested, the meaning of neoliberalism is heavily contested, so I will provide the basis of my argument by laying out a brief account of neoliberalism, which relies on a theoretical-historical reconstruction of its context of emergence around the middle of the 20th century. What I conclude from this reconstruction is that we are well-advised not to narrow down neoliberalism too much and not to downplay its internal heterogeneities. Therefore, rather than trying to isolate a number of doctrines or positions as quintessentially neoliberal or even considering them to be the “essence” of neoliberalism, I argue that what unites neoliberal discourse is not a set of positive convictions—although there is some significant overlap in certain areas—but rather a shared problematic that pertains to the preconditions of functioning markets. Within that overall problematic, democracy is one of the most pressing problems according to neoliberal thinkers, because virtually all of them agree that it complicates the task of setting up and securing the workings of functioning markets significantly. Still, this basic agreement notwithstanding, neoliberal accounts of democracy display a considerable range of specific diagnoses as to the nature and source of its dysfunctionalities or even pathologies. Accordingly, the second step of the argument is a survey of some selected lines of critique of democracy as they are formulated by leading neoliberals. Among other things, this survey helps us appreciate the heterogeneities of neoliberal thought, but, more importantly for my purposes, it also gives us a sense of the deep reservations neoliberals have with regard to democracy and the trenchant nature of their critique. As the specific critiques of democracy vary among neoliberals, so do the suggested remedies and reforms put forward. Accordingly, in the next step, several selected reform proposals are scrutinized that range from the vague call for a “strong state” to Hayek's “model constitution” and the much more specific argument for the introduction of a constitutional balanced-budget amendment, which is a signature demand of Buchanan. What this survey shows us, among other things, is the radical nature of the neoliberal reform proposals, which is important to my overall argument. Despite the highly controversial implications of all of these reform proposals, I will deliberately forego engaging them directly based on normative arguments. Instead, my critique focuses on the missing analytical link between neoliberal diagnostics and respective remedies. In order to show this, the fourth and final part of the argument shifts attention to the politics of neoliberal transformation, that is, whether and how this kind of politics is theorized in neoliberal accounts. Again, there is a certain degree of variance between Hayek, Eucken and Buchanan, but the common denominator here is the inability to theorize such a politics without violating the respective assumptions underlying the critical diagnostics or moving beyond the confines of liberal democracy as a condition of implementing such reforms. Thus, the key thesis I wish to defend in the following contends that neoliberal thought lacks any plausible solution to the so-called problem of transition—if they care to reflect on it at all.1 These findings lead to several different interpretations with more or less far-reaching implications that are discussed in the concluding section. It is commonplace nowadays to note the contested nature and potential vacuity of the term neoliberalism. Faced with these allegations, scholars of neoliberalism often hasten to offer some kind of working definition of neoliberalism, lest they lend credence to suspicions that they are operating with an empty signifier carrying political rather than analytical meaning. Accordingly, a set of policies—typically centered around the agenda of the Washington Consensus—is identified as quintessentially neoliberal, certain ideas or principles are considered to make up its core or essence or, neoliberal is simply that, which members of the Mont Pèlerin Society promulgate, which is an elegant but, upon closer inspection, not entirely convincing way to circumvent the problem (Chomsky, 1999; Crouch, 2011; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). On the other hand, there are regular interventions by scholars who emphasize the enormous variability/transformability of neoliberalism and its characteristic ability to form more or less tension-laden amalgamations with other political-intellectual projects, which makes it seemingly impossible, or at least intellectually imprudent, to aim for some hard and fast definition that “fixes” neoliberalism and its meaning(s): “Crisply unambiguous, essentialist definitions of neoliberalism have proved to be incredibly elusive” (Peck, 2010, p. 8). My own account of neoliberalism will try to strike a balance between overly parsimonious definitional attempts that do not hold up under closer scrutiny and the analytically defeatist solution to dissolve neoliberalism into various neoliberalisms that allegedly share nothing but Wittgensteinian family resemblances. The starting point of my conceptual approach is the observation that neoliberalism has become a truly toxic label these days, and it might therefore be useful to begin with a look at those who did describe themselves, albeit fleetingly and reluctantly, as neoliberals at the time and clarify the intellectual and political agenda that they attached the label “neoliberal” to. In other words, it is necessary to reconstruct the intellectual and political context of neoliberalism's emergence. Processes of emergence do not have a single origin but are dispersed, and the same goes for neoliberalism. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the Colloque Walter Lippmann as the “birth” of neoliberalism in the sense of the first culmination point of these processes and the event at which, for the first time, the term was officially adopted, denoting a shared agenda of the participants, which included not just Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow but also Jacques Rueff, Louis Rougier (the convener of the meeting) and, of course, Walter Lippmann himself. At this point, an impressive scholarship on the Colloque exists, so there is no need to go into the details of the proceedings (see instead Burgin, 2012; Dardot & Laval, 2013; Innset, 2020; Reinhoudt & Audier, 2018). The overall picture that emerges from them is a liberalism on the defensive that seeks to regain the status of a real contender against its main antagonists, collectivism and—to a lesser degree back then—Keynesianism. In the eyes of practically all of the participants except for Ludwig von Mises, this endeavor presupposed a critical revision of the classical liberal agenda, and, most notably, abandoning simplistic formulas such as “laissez-faire,” or, what some referred to as “Manchesterism.”2 The neoliberal discourse in formation here was, thus, a far cry from the creed of “self-regulating markets.” Instead, the entire point of the neoliberal approach is to affirm the value of markets against collectivists and Keynesians while insisting that they are not nearly as robust and self-sustaining as large parts of the liberal tradition were inclined to believe up to that point. To put it more pointedly, the market per se was not the solution to all problems; rather, the market itself turned into a problem for neoliberal thought as it was seen as an entity in need of constant care and premised upon a number of preconditions. Therefore, what I call the neoliberal problematic pertains to the preconditions of functioning markets, that is, markets on which the price mechanism reigns as unperturbed as possible.3 The irreducible heterogeneities that characterize neoliberal discourse are not the least due to the manifold and at times contradictory ways in which this problematic can be, and has been, spelled out and addressed. Still, what becomes clear is that neoliberal thought might be centered around the notion of markets, but the intellectual energies of those whose work is animated by this problematic, such as Buchanan, Hayek, or the German ordoliberals, inevitably gravitate toward the infrastructure that needs to be put in place and defended against changing adversaries for these markets to function. This is the realm of the social and the political, and therefore it is only stringent for the neoliberals to invest so much time into conceptualizing the state—and democracy. When neoliberals talk about democracy, they typically refer to democracy in its existing form, that is, their discourse rarely ventures into philosophical inquiries into the nature and theory of democracy. The predominant form their discourse takes is that of a critique of the respective contemporary forms of representative democracy. These respective contexts leave an imprint on the various accounts of democracy, but rather than probing the details of each, in this survey, I will highlight what I consider to be three types of arguments or varieties of the neoliberal critique of democracy that can be analytically distinguished.4 The first set of arguments against democracy considered here is particularly prominent in ordoliberal discourse but not exclusive to it:5 For Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken, the main threat associated with democracy is due to the influence of a new phenomenon on the political scene, namely, the masses. With the rise of mass democracy, the latter have acquired a heretofore unknown leverage over political decisions, or at least this is the assumption under which the ordoliberals in particular are operating. Hence, the problem is not the existence of masses per se but rather their integration into the political process through mass democratic institutions as it unfolds unevenly but steadily over the course of the first half of the 20th century. While the aversion against the masses may seem no more than a variant on the venerable liberal-conservative topos of the tyranny of the majority, there is more to it. The masses are more than a majority. In a discourse crucially shaped by Gustave Le Bon's Crowds, Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Jose Ortega Y. Gasset's Revolt of the Masses (who was invited to the Colloque but did not participate), the concept of the masses is psychologically (and at times racially) charged. Masses are attributed with infantilism and general irrationality, which makes them the perfect molding material for demagogues who exploit their uncritical receptiveness and malleability to mobilize them for political projects—typically ones that involve state planning and collectivization from the perspective of the ordoliberals. There is ample textual evidence for this stance, so a few examples may suffice here as the basis of this interpretation. Eucken notes: “But while people can only live in certain orders, the mass tends towards destroying these exact orders” (Eucken, 1960, p. 14), and in one of the classic texts inaugurating the ordoliberal tradition from 1932, he laments “that the simultaneous process of democratisation lent the parties, and the masses and interest groups that they organised, much greater influence over the management of the state, and so upon economic policy” (Eucken, 2017, [1932], p. 59). Röpke complements these views: “In all countries, in some less, in others more, society has been ground into a mass of individuals, who have never been so closely herded together and so dependent on each other and yet at the same time they are more rootless, more isolated and more like grains of sand than ever before … All the misery, all the problems of our time have their ultimate roots here…” (Röpke, 1950, [1942], p. 92). Elsewhere, he draws on the above-mentioned social psychological framing of the masses: “As a part of ‘mass’, we are different from what we normally are and should be in healthy circumstances; we are subhuman, herdlike, and the state of society dangerously corresponds to our own” (Röpke, 1960, p. 53). And while the most extreme manifestations of what might be called the mass syndrome only occur in what Röpke terms mass in the “acute state,” massification as a permanent condition is hardly less alarming, since it heralds the reign of mediocre brutes at the expense of the “unalterable aristocracy of nature” Röpke hopes to defend (Röpke, 1960, p. 55). To sum up this line of criticism, economic policy is simply too important and much too intricate to leave it to the wayward masses, who may not sit in parliaments and run governments in representative democracies, but are still too influential under the conditions of mass democracy, even if only as the object of demagogic agitation and mobilization. If the alliance of these forces had their way, democracy is bound to transform into collectivism, that is, the prime adversary of neoliberal thought: “There is no denying it: the collectivist state is rooted in the masses” (Röpke, 1950, p. 86). The second line of criticism also owes its classic formulation to another ordoliberal, namely, Alexander Rüstow. The target of this criticism, in addition to the mass dimension of contemporary democracy, is its alleged excessive “pluralism.” Rüstow succinctly sums up the respective core concern: “The democratic, parliamentary structure of some of the economically leading states caused the economic corruption to spread to the internal policy of the state, to the political parties, and to the [sic!] parliamentarism itself. The political parties were slowly transformed into parliamentary agencies of economic pressure groups and were financed by them. … The pathological form of government which developed this way was that of pluralism…” (Rüstow, 2017a, [1942], p. 159). Under conditions of mass democracy, (economic) pressure groups will gain such extraordinary influence that they can almost dictate their will to political parties; the result is marginalization of a vaguely defined common good, which is dissolved into what Eucken calls in no uncertain terms “group anarchy” (Eucken, 1960, p. 171). The state, as the presumptive guardian of this common good, is undermined in this process of economic-political clientelism, and Rüstow echoes the scathing criticism of pluralism by Carl Schmitt in his conclusion: “What takes place here accords with the motto: ‘The state as prey’” (Rüstow, 2017b, [1932], p. 147). Under conditions of unchecked pluralism, the state is weakened continuously and the resulting centrifugal dynamics ultimately become unmanageable as the political community falls apart at the hands of particularistic actors emerging from every corner of society. Thirdly, there is a strictly contemporary line of criticism that still exhibits some correspondence to the critique of pluralism just sketched. The central theorem underlying this critique is that of rent-seeking, which describes a behavior that seeks to gain some kind of advantage over others not through productive action and competition but rather by lobbying for some kind of special treatment, typically an exemption from certain rules. This idea builds on the insights of game theory and rational choice approaches, according to which individual utility is often maximized when (generally beneficial) rules apply to all but the individual in question, and much of the public choice critique of democracy is built around this basal notion: Under conditions of democracy, the constant demand for special treatment of societal/economic actors is met by an eager supplier in the form of political actors hoping thus to increase their chances of reelection. As one of the cofounders of the public choice tradition, it is a matter of course, that Buchanan puts the rent-seeking theorem at the center of his critique of representative democracy and he is not the only neoliberal who does so: Milton Friedman as well as the later Hayek would occasionally, albeit not systematically, draw on the basic logic of rent-seeking (see Friedman & Friedman, 1984). The fundamental problem that allegedly ensues from rent-seeking can be summed up in the following way: Assuming that everybody else engages in rent-seeking, individual rationality dictates that one does so as well because, otherwise, one would be indirectly disadvantaged to the degree that others gain exemptions from rules that still apply to oneself. This means that rent-seeking has an inherently expansive dynamic, and as a general practice, it backfires against the intent of its subjects because even if individual rent-seeking may be successful and provides an advantage, this is vastly outweighed by the multiple disadvantages one has to suffer due to all other rent-seeking activities, assuming they are successful as well. Thus, in pursuit of their individual utility, the actors in a society end up putting themselves at a disadvantage. Just as in the pluralist scenario, it is particularism that prevails here, albeit with a tragic twist. But not only does the “rent-seeking society” (Buchanan et al., 1980) harm its current members: Exemptions and other special treatments typically come with some kind of price tag, and since financing through raising taxes is not a realistic option under public choice assumptions, and lawmakers, as well as government, have less and less control over inflation, the prime strategy to pay for rents is through deficits and debt—burdening the almost proverbial “future generations” with financial obligations that they had no say in—arguably a clear violation of the democratic principle of autonomy. Finally, there is a line of critique that focuses on the decline of the rule of law in relation to democracy and problematizes the alleged unlimited nature of the latter. The prime exemplar of this line of argument is Friedrich August Hayek, who laid out the various aspects in numerous writings. To be sure, Hayek conceded that democracy, in principle, had its merits: “[I]t is the only convention we have yet discovered to make peaceful change possible” (Hayek, 2003, III, p. 137) However, the ideal of democracy and its basic thrust of limiting power became disfigured over time. The Constitution of Liberty already contains the central point of Hayek's critique in a nutshell: “The crucial conception of the doctrinaire democrat is that of popular sovereignty. This means to him that Majority rule is unlimited and unlimitable. The ideal of democracy, originally intended to prevent all arbitrary power, thus becomes the justification for a new arbitrary power” (Hayek, 2006, p. 93) The deeper reason for this, according to Hayek, is the erosion of the principle of the rule of law, which he chronicles in the Constitution of Liberty and that involves, prominently, the shedding of any formal prerequisites of what constitutes a genuine law. While in the heyday of liberalism, only those legal rules that were abstract, general, and directed at future behavior were considered to be law in the proper sense of the term, nowadays, Hayek claims, whatever emerges from a legislature is deemed to have the power of law, thus empowering parliaments to engage in the kind of discretionary planning activities that he considers to be harmful on any number of levels. And since there are no longer any formal restrictions on this unrestrained democracy, politicians have no instruments at their disposal to fend off the demands from societal interest groups. “The root of the trouble is, of course, to sum up, that in an unlimited democracy the holders of discretionary powers are forced to use them, whether they wish it or not, to favour particular groups on whose swing vote their powers depend” (Hayek, 2003, III, p. 139), concludes Hayek, thus echoing in this regard the second and third lines of critique sketched out above. The main thrust of Hayek's argument, though, is a combination of the critique of democracy as majority rule—spelled out most prominently in The Constitution of Liberty (see Hayek, 2006, pp. 90–102)—and the contention that this majority rule is no longer restrained in any meaningful way, thus giving rise to an almost dystopian “unlimited democracy,” which, Hayek thought, would ultimately lead toward totalitarianism: “[T]he whole work [Law, Legislation and Liberty] has been inspired by a growing apprehension about the direction in which the political order of what used to be regarded as the most advanced countries is tending. The growing conviction … that this threatening development towards a totalitarian state is made inevitable by certain deeply entrenched defects of construction of the generally accepted type of ‘democratic’ government has forced me to think through various alternative arrangements” (Hayek, 2003, I, p. xx). It is to these alternative arrangements in the works of the various neoliberals accounts discussed here that we now turn to. It would exceed the scope of this paper to survey every reform proposal submitted by leading neoliberals, so I will merely focus on three more or less specific reform visions being put forward by Buchanan, Hayek as well as the ordoliberals Rüstow and Eucken, respectively, which are to deal with the various shortcomings or pathologies of democracy as they are pinpointed in the diagnoses sketched out in the preceding section. Let us begin with what arguably is the most specific proposal to be found in the neoliberal reform portfolio and which came to be a signature demand raised by James Buchanan, although a slightly different version has also been promoted by Milton Friedman. The proposal seeks to address the proclivity to engage in rent-seeking behavior or rather to grant rents to interest groups on behalf of elected officials in order to improve chances at reelection. Buchanan became ever more pessimistic in his assessment of (American) democracy over the years, eventually claiming that “the appeal to the experience of history, and not least to recent events in the United States, does suggest that government, in its current institutional setting, is close to being out of the control of the electorate” (Brennan & Buchanan, 1980, p. 25). In order to come to terms with this deteriorating situation, one of Buchanan's prime suggestions is to pursue the strategy of reining in democratic excesses through tighter controls of the way public expenditures are financed. What democracy requires is a rule that precludes the debt/deficit financing of these outlays, and it should preferably be instituted on the highest possible legal level: a constitutional balanced-budget amendment (Buchanan, 1997). The amendment would stipulate rather that all current state expenditures must be financed through actual revenue, be it taxation or otherwise; it would be simply unconstitutional to accrue deficits and debt to finance state expenditures. Given such restrictions, politicians are expected to restrain runaway spending and curtail public expenditure, instead of attempting to rely on a low tax strategy to succeed at the polls. Whether this is a realistic scenario for the impact of such a proposal could be discussed in much greater detail as could be the normative questions related to it, but following the strategy of my critique laid out initially, I will confine myself to this quick exposition and move on to the second and much more elaborate reform proposal, which is Hayek's “model constitution” (Hayek, 2003, pp. 105–127). The major thrust of Hayek's proposal is a restoration of a strict separation of powers between government and legislature. His diagnosis problematizes the conflation of both, and therefore real bicameralism has to be reinstituted where legislatures only pass laws in the proper sense of the term that circumscribe the room for discretionary action the government enjoys. Of the many noteworthy aspects of this exercise in institutional design, I will only highlight one particularly intriguing aspect that has also drawn considerable criticism: In many respects, the governing assembly hardly differs in its main characteristics from empirically existing governments, although Hayek is seriously entertaining the disenfranchisement of anybody who receives transfers or salaries from the state in governmental elections (Hayek, 2003, p. 120). Still, the major target of criticism is the election rules for the legislature, which is arguably the real locus of power in this new institutional set-up as the governmental assembly is to be strictly “bound by the rules of just conduct laid down by the Legislative Assembly” (Hayek, 2003, p. 119). Members of the legislature are to be elected in the following way: Each year all citizens of the age of 45 choose their representatives out of the midst of their demographic cohort to replace the contingent of outgoing legislators at the end of their 15-year term. What Hayek has in mind is “an assembly of men and women elected at a relatively mature age for fairly long periods, such as fifteen years, so they would not be re-eligible nor forced to return to earning a living in the market but be assured of continued public employment in such honorific but neutral positions as lay judges, so that during their tenure as legislators they would be neither dependent on party support nor concerned about their personal future” (Hayek, 2003, p. 113). The rationale behind this design is clear enough. The long tenure, ineligibility to be reelected, and guaranteed future employment seek to minimize the incentive to engage in rent-seeking behavior on behalf of legislators and, furthermore, the structuring principle of age groups allegedly would preclude the formation of political party affiliations within the legislatures. And even if they were to form, “those leaning towards different parties would be induced to discuss the issues together, and would become conscious that they had the common task of representing the outlook of their generation…” (Hayek, 2003, p. 118). Obviously, this radical proposal is open to many criticisms from the perspective of democratic theory, but let us leave this aside and instead turn to the final proposal to be considered here, which is also the least specific, calling for the transformation of statehood into a “strong state” as its main proponents Alexander Rüstow and Walter Eucken refer to it. This remedy manifests the stringent conclusion from the critical diagnosis of excessive pluralism, which is prevalent among most ordoliberals; even Röpke, who is less vocal on this theme, reminds his readers that “the immense danger of this unhealthy pluralism is that pressure groups covetously beset the state” and that “any responsible government must examine carefully all the possible means of resisting this pluralistic disintegration of the state” (Röpke, 1960, pp. 144, 143). Still, the most vehement calls for a strong state come from his ordoliberal compatriots Rüstow and Eucken. The former concludes his lecture State Policy and the Necessary Conditions for Economic Liberalism from 1932 with the following remarks: “The new liberalism, which I and my friends promote, demands a strong state, a state that is positioned above the economy, above the interested parties, in the place where it belongs. And with this confession of faith in a strong state that promotes liberal economic policies and—because the two mutually condition each other—in liberal economic policies that promote a strong state, with this confession I should like to end” (Rüstow, 2017b, p. 149). The state is thus to remove itself from the pluralistic rancor of political parties and interest groups and take up a position that enables it to fend off the demands coming from these actors. In the same year, Eucken published what will come to be considered a founding text of the ordoliberal tradition, entitled Structural Transformation of the State and the Crisis of Capitalism. In this far-ranging article, Eucken lays out his own version of the narrative of liberal decline, which, in his view, happens to coincide with that of Carl Schmitt in this respect and comes to the fore in “the transformation of the liberal state into an economic state” (Eucken, 2017, p. 59). For Eucken, the merging of state, society, and economy encapsulated in the economic state is of the most serious consequence as it “has undermined independent decision-making on the part of the state, something upon which its very existence depends. … All recent economic policy clearly demonstrates this corrosive process: it amounts to a plethora of me","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12713","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a notoriously contested term, and even among those who principally subscribe to it, which is mostly its critics, fierce debates persist over its nature, how to study it properly—and whether it is still the appropriate conceptual armament to understand the contemporary world and an arguably emerging “post-neoliberalism” (Davies & Gane, 2021). Not only is it controversial how neoliberalism should be defined—a governing rationality in the spirit of Foucault's governmentality lectures (Foucault, 2008), a portfolio of certain policies, or a strategy of transnational capital to restore and safeguard profit rates (Harvey, 2005)—but also on what level to study it, either that of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Cahill, 2014), a set of theories and arguments, or both. My starting point and focus for most of this paper is neoliberal thought as it is represented by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, the German ordoliberals, and, importantly, James Buchanan. My aim is to develop a critical account of neoliberal thought that will abstain from explicitly normative criticisms and rather opt for a more indirect but effective and somewhat novel critique that holds neoliberalism to its own standards and shows how it fails to meet them or is pushed into adopting highly questionable positions in the attempt to do so. The argument proceeds as follows: As already suggested, the meaning of neoliberalism is heavily contested, so I will provide the basis of my argument by laying out a brief account of neoliberalism, which relies on a theoretical-historical reconstruction of its context of emergence around the middle of the 20th century. What I conclude from this reconstruction is that we are well-advised not to narrow down neoliberalism too much and not to downplay its internal heterogeneities. Therefore, rather than trying to isolate a number of doctrines or positions as quintessentially neoliberal or even considering them to be the “essence” of neoliberalism, I argue that what unites neoliberal discourse is not a set of positive convictions—although there is some significant overlap in certain areas—but rather a shared problematic that pertains to the preconditions of functioning markets. Within that overall problematic, democracy is one of the most pressing problems according to neoliberal thinkers, because virtually all of them agree that it complicates the task of setting up and securing the workings of functioning markets significantly. Still, this basic agreement notwithstanding, neoliberal accounts of democracy display a considerable range of specific diagnoses as to the nature and source of its dysfunctionalities or even pathologies. Accordingly, the second step of the argument is a survey of some selected lines of critique of democracy as they are formulated by leading neoliberals. Among other things, this survey helps us appreciate the heterogeneities of neoliberal thought, but, more importantly for my purposes, it also gives us a sense of the deep reservations neoliberals have with regard to democracy and the trenchant nature of their critique. As the specific critiques of democracy vary among neoliberals, so do the suggested remedies and reforms put forward. Accordingly, in the next step, several selected reform proposals are scrutinized that range from the vague call for a “strong state” to Hayek's “model constitution” and the much more specific argument for the introduction of a constitutional balanced-budget amendment, which is a signature demand of Buchanan. What this survey shows us, among other things, is the radical nature of the neoliberal reform proposals, which is important to my overall argument. Despite the highly controversial implications of all of these reform proposals, I will deliberately forego engaging them directly based on normative arguments. Instead, my critique focuses on the missing analytical link between neoliberal diagnostics and respective remedies. In order to show this, the fourth and final part of the argument shifts attention to the politics of neoliberal transformation, that is, whether and how this kind of politics is theorized in neoliberal accounts. Again, there is a certain degree of variance between Hayek, Eucken and Buchanan, but the common denominator here is the inability to theorize such a politics without violating the respective assumptions underlying the critical diagnostics or moving beyond the confines of liberal democracy as a condition of implementing such reforms. Thus, the key thesis I wish to defend in the following contends that neoliberal thought lacks any plausible solution to the so-called problem of transition—if they care to reflect on it at all.1 These findings lead to several different interpretations with more or less far-reaching implications that are discussed in the concluding section. It is commonplace nowadays to note the contested nature and potential vacuity of the term neoliberalism. Faced with these allegations, scholars of neoliberalism often hasten to offer some kind of working definition of neoliberalism, lest they lend credence to suspicions that they are operating with an empty signifier carrying political rather than analytical meaning. Accordingly, a set of policies—typically centered around the agenda of the Washington Consensus—is identified as quintessentially neoliberal, certain ideas or principles are considered to make up its core or essence or, neoliberal is simply that, which members of the Mont Pèlerin Society promulgate, which is an elegant but, upon closer inspection, not entirely convincing way to circumvent the problem (Chomsky, 1999; Crouch, 2011; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). On the other hand, there are regular interventions by scholars who emphasize the enormous variability/transformability of neoliberalism and its characteristic ability to form more or less tension-laden amalgamations with other political-intellectual projects, which makes it seemingly impossible, or at least intellectually imprudent, to aim for some hard and fast definition that “fixes” neoliberalism and its meaning(s): “Crisply unambiguous, essentialist definitions of neoliberalism have proved to be incredibly elusive” (Peck, 2010, p. 8). My own account of neoliberalism will try to strike a balance between overly parsimonious definitional attempts that do not hold up under closer scrutiny and the analytically defeatist solution to dissolve neoliberalism into various neoliberalisms that allegedly share nothing but Wittgensteinian family resemblances. The starting point of my conceptual approach is the observation that neoliberalism has become a truly toxic label these days, and it might therefore be useful to begin with a look at those who did describe themselves, albeit fleetingly and reluctantly, as neoliberals at the time and clarify the intellectual and political agenda that they attached the label “neoliberal” to. In other words, it is necessary to reconstruct the intellectual and political context of neoliberalism's emergence. Processes of emergence do not have a single origin but are dispersed, and the same goes for neoliberalism. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the Colloque Walter Lippmann as the “birth” of neoliberalism in the sense of the first culmination point of these processes and the event at which, for the first time, the term was officially adopted, denoting a shared agenda of the participants, which included not just Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow but also Jacques Rueff, Louis Rougier (the convener of the meeting) and, of course, Walter Lippmann himself. At this point, an impressive scholarship on the Colloque exists, so there is no need to go into the details of the proceedings (see instead Burgin, 2012; Dardot & Laval, 2013; Innset, 2020; Reinhoudt & Audier, 2018). The overall picture that emerges from them is a liberalism on the defensive that seeks to regain the status of a real contender against its main antagonists, collectivism and—to a lesser degree back then—Keynesianism. In the eyes of practically all of the participants except for Ludwig von Mises, this endeavor presupposed a critical revision of the classical liberal agenda, and, most notably, abandoning simplistic formulas such as “laissez-faire,” or, what some referred to as “Manchesterism.”2 The neoliberal discourse in formation here was, thus, a far cry from the creed of “self-regulating markets.” Instead, the entire point of the neoliberal approach is to affirm the value of markets against collectivists and Keynesians while insisting that they are not nearly as robust and self-sustaining as large parts of the liberal tradition were inclined to believe up to that point. To put it more pointedly, the market per se was not the solution to all problems; rather, the market itself turned into a problem for neoliberal thought as it was seen as an entity in need of constant care and premised upon a number of preconditions. Therefore, what I call the neoliberal problematic pertains to the preconditions of functioning markets, that is, markets on which the price mechanism reigns as unperturbed as possible.3 The irreducible heterogeneities that characterize neoliberal discourse are not the least due to the manifold and at times contradictory ways in which this problematic can be, and has been, spelled out and addressed. Still, what becomes clear is that neoliberal thought might be centered around the notion of markets, but the intellectual energies of those whose work is animated by this problematic, such as Buchanan, Hayek, or the German ordoliberals, inevitably gravitate toward the infrastructure that needs to be put in place and defended against changing adversaries for these markets to function. This is the realm of the social and the political, and therefore it is only stringent for the neoliberals to invest so much time into conceptualizing the state—and democracy. When neoliberals talk about democracy, they typically refer to democracy in its existing form, that is, their discourse rarely ventures into philosophical inquiries into the nature and theory of democracy. The predominant form their discourse takes is that of a critique of the respective contemporary forms of representative democracy. These respective contexts leave an imprint on the various accounts of democracy, but rather than probing the details of each, in this survey, I will highlight what I consider to be three types of arguments or varieties of the neoliberal critique of democracy that can be analytically distinguished.4 The first set of arguments against democracy considered here is particularly prominent in ordoliberal discourse but not exclusive to it:5 For Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken, the main threat associated with democracy is due to the influence of a new phenomenon on the political scene, namely, the masses. With the rise of mass democracy, the latter have acquired a heretofore unknown leverage over political decisions, or at least this is the assumption under which the ordoliberals in particular are operating. Hence, the problem is not the existence of masses per se but rather their integration into the political process through mass democratic institutions as it unfolds unevenly but steadily over the course of the first half of the 20th century. While the aversion against the masses may seem no more than a variant on the venerable liberal-conservative topos of the tyranny of the majority, there is more to it. The masses are more than a majority. In a discourse crucially shaped by Gustave Le Bon's Crowds, Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Jose Ortega Y. Gasset's Revolt of the Masses (who was invited to the Colloque but did not participate), the concept of the masses is psychologically (and at times racially) charged. Masses are attributed with infantilism and general irrationality, which makes them the perfect molding material for demagogues who exploit their uncritical receptiveness and malleability to mobilize them for political projects—typically ones that involve state planning and collectivization from the perspective of the ordoliberals. There is ample textual evidence for this stance, so a few examples may suffice here as the basis of this interpretation. Eucken notes: “But while people can only live in certain orders, the mass tends towards destroying these exact orders” (Eucken, 1960, p. 14), and in one of the classic texts inaugurating the ordoliberal tradition from 1932, he laments “that the simultaneous process of democratisation lent the parties, and the masses and interest groups that they organised, much greater influence over the management of the state, and so upon economic policy” (Eucken, 2017, [1932], p. 59). Röpke complements these views: “In all countries, in some less, in others more, society has been ground into a mass of individuals, who have never been so closely herded together and so dependent on each other and yet at the same time they are more rootless, more isolated and more like grains of sand than ever before … All the misery, all the problems of our time have their ultimate roots here…” (Röpke, 1950, [1942], p. 92). Elsewhere, he draws on the above-mentioned social psychological framing of the masses: “As a part of ‘mass’, we are different from what we normally are and should be in healthy circumstances; we are subhuman, herdlike, and the state of society dangerously corresponds to our own” (Röpke, 1960, p. 53). And while the most extreme manifestations of what might be called the mass syndrome only occur in what Röpke terms mass in the “acute state,” massification as a permanent condition is hardly less alarming, since it heralds the reign of mediocre brutes at the expense of the “unalterable aristocracy of nature” Röpke hopes to defend (Röpke, 1960, p. 55). To sum up this line of criticism, economic policy is simply too important and much too intricate to leave it to the wayward masses, who may not sit in parliaments and run governments in representative democracies, but are still too influential under the conditions of mass democracy, even if only as the object of demagogic agitation and mobilization. If the alliance of these forces had their way, democracy is bound to transform into collectivism, that is, the prime adversary of neoliberal thought: “There is no denying it: the collectivist state is rooted in the masses” (Röpke, 1950, p. 86). The second line of criticism also owes its classic formulation to another ordoliberal, namely, Alexander Rüstow. The target of this criticism, in addition to the mass dimension of contemporary democracy, is its alleged excessive “pluralism.” Rüstow succinctly sums up the respective core concern: “The democratic, parliamentary structure of some of the economically leading states caused the economic corruption to spread to the internal policy of the state, to the political parties, and to the [sic!] parliamentarism itself. The political parties were slowly transformed into parliamentary agencies of economic pressure groups and were financed by them. … The pathological form of government which developed this way was that of pluralism…” (Rüstow, 2017a, [1942], p. 159). Under conditions of mass democracy, (economic) pressure groups will gain such extraordinary influence that they can almost dictate their will to political parties; the result is marginalization of a vaguely defined common good, which is dissolved into what Eucken calls in no uncertain terms “group anarchy” (Eucken, 1960, p. 171). The state, as the presumptive guardian of this common good, is undermined in this process of economic-political clientelism, and Rüstow echoes the scathing criticism of pluralism by Carl Schmitt in his conclusion: “What takes place here accords with the motto: ‘The state as prey’” (Rüstow, 2017b, [1932], p. 147). Under conditions of unchecked pluralism, the state is weakened continuously and the resulting centrifugal dynamics ultimately become unmanageable as the political community falls apart at the hands of particularistic actors emerging from every corner of society. Thirdly, there is a strictly contemporary line of criticism that still exhibits some correspondence to the critique of pluralism just sketched. The central theorem underlying this critique is that of rent-seeking, which describes a behavior that seeks to gain some kind of advantage over others not through productive action and competition but rather by lobbying for some kind of special treatment, typically an exemption from certain rules. This idea builds on the insights of game theory and rational choice approaches, according to which individual utility is often maximized when (generally beneficial) rules apply to all but the individual in question, and much of the public choice critique of democracy is built around this basal notion: Under conditions of democracy, the constant demand for special treatment of societal/economic actors is met by an eager supplier in the form of political actors hoping thus to increase their chances of reelection. As one of the cofounders of the public choice tradition, it is a matter of course, that Buchanan puts the rent-seeking theorem at the center of his critique of representative democracy and he is not the only neoliberal who does so: Milton Friedman as well as the later Hayek would occasionally, albeit not systematically, draw on the basic logic of rent-seeking (see Friedman & Friedman, 1984). The fundamental problem that allegedly ensues from rent-seeking can be summed up in the following way: Assuming that everybody else engages in rent-seeking, individual rationality dictates that one does so as well because, otherwise, one would be indirectly disadvantaged to the degree that others gain exemptions from rules that still apply to oneself. This means that rent-seeking has an inherently expansive dynamic, and as a general practice, it backfires against the intent of its subjects because even if individual rent-seeking may be successful and provides an advantage, this is vastly outweighed by the multiple disadvantages one has to suffer due to all other rent-seeking activities, assuming they are successful as well. Thus, in pursuit of their individual utility, the actors in a society end up putting themselves at a disadvantage. Just as in the pluralist scenario, it is particularism that prevails here, albeit with a tragic twist. But not only does the “rent-seeking society” (Buchanan et al., 1980) harm its current members: Exemptions and other special treatments typically come with some kind of price tag, and since financing through raising taxes is not a realistic option under public choice assumptions, and lawmakers, as well as government, have less and less control over inflation, the prime strategy to pay for rents is through deficits and debt—burdening the almost proverbial “future generations” with financial obligations that they had no say in—arguably a clear violation of the democratic principle of autonomy. Finally, there is a line of critique that focuses on the decline of the rule of law in relation to democracy and problematizes the alleged unlimited nature of the latter. The prime exemplar of this line of argument is Friedrich August Hayek, who laid out the various aspects in numerous writings. To be sure, Hayek conceded that democracy, in principle, had its merits: “[I]t is the only convention we have yet discovered to make peaceful change possible” (Hayek, 2003, III, p. 137) However, the ideal of democracy and its basic thrust of limiting power became disfigured over time. The Constitution of Liberty already contains the central point of Hayek's critique in a nutshell: “The crucial conception of the doctrinaire democrat is that of popular sovereignty. This means to him that Majority rule is unlimited and unlimitable. The ideal of democracy, originally intended to prevent all arbitrary power, thus becomes the justification for a new arbitrary power” (Hayek, 2006, p. 93) The deeper reason for this, according to Hayek, is the erosion of the principle of the rule of law, which he chronicles in the Constitution of Liberty and that involves, prominently, the shedding of any formal prerequisites of what constitutes a genuine law. While in the heyday of liberalism, only those legal rules that were abstract, general, and directed at future behavior were considered to be law in the proper sense of the term, nowadays, Hayek claims, whatever emerges from a legislature is deemed to have the power of law, thus empowering parliaments to engage in the kind of discretionary planning activities that he considers to be harmful on any number of levels. And since there are no longer any formal restrictions on this unrestrained democracy, politicians have no instruments at their disposal to fend off the demands from societal interest groups. “The root of the trouble is, of course, to sum up, that in an unlimited democracy the holders of discretionary powers are forced to use them, whether they wish it or not, to favour particular groups on whose swing vote their powers depend” (Hayek, 2003, III, p. 139), concludes Hayek, thus echoing in this regard the second and third lines of critique sketched out above. The main thrust of Hayek's argument, though, is a combination of the critique of democracy as majority rule—spelled out most prominently in The Constitution of Liberty (see Hayek, 2006, pp. 90–102)—and the contention that this majority rule is no longer restrained in any meaningful way, thus giving rise to an almost dystopian “unlimited democracy,” which, Hayek thought, would ultimately lead toward totalitarianism: “[T]he whole work [Law, Legislation and Liberty] has been inspired by a growing apprehension about the direction in which the political order of what used to be regarded as the most advanced countries is tending. The growing conviction … that this threatening development towards a totalitarian state is made inevitable by certain deeply entrenched defects of construction of the generally accepted type of ‘democratic’ government has forced me to think through various alternative arrangements” (Hayek, 2003, I, p. xx). It is to these alternative arrangements in the works of the various neoliberals accounts discussed here that we now turn to. It would exceed the scope of this paper to survey every reform proposal submitted by leading neoliberals, so I will merely focus on three more or less specific reform visions being put forward by Buchanan, Hayek as well as the ordoliberals Rüstow and Eucken, respectively, which are to deal with the various shortcomings or pathologies of democracy as they are pinpointed in the diagnoses sketched out in the preceding section. Let us begin with what arguably is the most specific proposal to be found in the neoliberal reform portfolio and which came to be a signature demand raised by James Buchanan, although a slightly different version has also been promoted by Milton Friedman. The proposal seeks to address the proclivity to engage in rent-seeking behavior or rather to grant rents to interest groups on behalf of elected officials in order to improve chances at reelection. Buchanan became ever more pessimistic in his assessment of (American) democracy over the years, eventually claiming that “the appeal to the experience of history, and not least to recent events in the United States, does suggest that government, in its current institutional setting, is close to being out of the control of the electorate” (Brennan & Buchanan, 1980, p. 25). In order to come to terms with this deteriorating situation, one of Buchanan's prime suggestions is to pursue the strategy of reining in democratic excesses through tighter controls of the way public expenditures are financed. What democracy requires is a rule that precludes the debt/deficit financing of these outlays, and it should preferably be instituted on the highest possible legal level: a constitutional balanced-budget amendment (Buchanan, 1997). The amendment would stipulate rather that all current state expenditures must be financed through actual revenue, be it taxation or otherwise; it would be simply unconstitutional to accrue deficits and debt to finance state expenditures. Given such restrictions, politicians are expected to restrain runaway spending and curtail public expenditure, instead of attempting to rely on a low tax strategy to succeed at the polls. Whether this is a realistic scenario for the impact of such a proposal could be discussed in much greater detail as could be the normative questions related to it, but following the strategy of my critique laid out initially, I will confine myself to this quick exposition and move on to the second and much more elaborate reform proposal, which is Hayek's “model constitution” (Hayek, 2003, pp. 105–127). The major thrust of Hayek's proposal is a restoration of a strict separation of powers between government and legislature. His diagnosis problematizes the conflation of both, and therefore real bicameralism has to be reinstituted where legislatures only pass laws in the proper sense of the term that circumscribe the room for discretionary action the government enjoys. Of the many noteworthy aspects of this exercise in institutional design, I will only highlight one particularly intriguing aspect that has also drawn considerable criticism: In many respects, the governing assembly hardly differs in its main characteristics from empirically existing governments, although Hayek is seriously entertaining the disenfranchisement of anybody who receives transfers or salaries from the state in governmental elections (Hayek, 2003, p. 120). Still, the major target of criticism is the election rules for the legislature, which is arguably the real locus of power in this new institutional set-up as the governmental assembly is to be strictly “bound by the rules of just conduct laid down by the Legislative Assembly” (Hayek, 2003, p. 119). Members of the legislature are to be elected in the following way: Each year all citizens of the age of 45 choose their representatives out of the midst of their demographic cohort to replace the contingent of outgoing legislators at the end of their 15-year term. What Hayek has in mind is “an assembly of men and women elected at a relatively mature age for fairly long periods, such as fifteen years, so they would not be re-eligible nor forced to return to earning a living in the market but be assured of continued public employment in such honorific but neutral positions as lay judges, so that during their tenure as legislators they would be neither dependent on party support nor concerned about their personal future” (Hayek, 2003, p. 113). The rationale behind this design is clear enough. The long tenure, ineligibility to be reelected, and guaranteed future employment seek to minimize the incentive to engage in rent-seeking behavior on behalf of legislators and, furthermore, the structuring principle of age groups allegedly would preclude the formation of political party affiliations within the legislatures. And even if they were to form, “those leaning towards different parties would be induced to discuss the issues together, and would become conscious that they had the common task of representing the outlook of their generation…” (Hayek, 2003, p. 118). Obviously, this radical proposal is open to many criticisms from the perspective of democratic theory, but let us leave this aside and instead turn to the final proposal to be considered here, which is also the least specific, calling for the transformation of statehood into a “strong state” as its main proponents Alexander Rüstow and Walter Eucken refer to it. This remedy manifests the stringent conclusion from the critical diagnosis of excessive pluralism, which is prevalent among most ordoliberals; even Röpke, who is less vocal on this theme, reminds his readers that “the immense danger of this unhealthy pluralism is that pressure groups covetously beset the state” and that “any responsible government must examine carefully all the possible means of resisting this pluralistic disintegration of the state” (Röpke, 1960, pp. 144, 143). Still, the most vehement calls for a strong state come from his ordoliberal compatriots Rüstow and Eucken. The former concludes his lecture State Policy and the Necessary Conditions for Economic Liberalism from 1932 with the following remarks: “The new liberalism, which I and my friends promote, demands a strong state, a state that is positioned above the economy, above the interested parties, in the place where it belongs. And with this confession of faith in a strong state that promotes liberal economic policies and—because the two mutually condition each other—in liberal economic policies that promote a strong state, with this confession I should like to end” (Rüstow, 2017b, p. 149). The state is thus to remove itself from the pluralistic rancor of political parties and interest groups and take up a position that enables it to fend off the demands coming from these actors. In the same year, Eucken published what will come to be considered a founding text of the ordoliberal tradition, entitled Structural Transformation of the State and the Crisis of Capitalism. In this far-ranging article, Eucken lays out his own version of the narrative of liberal decline, which, in his view, happens to coincide with that of Carl Schmitt in this respect and comes to the fore in “the transformation of the liberal state into an economic state” (Eucken, 2017, p. 59). For Eucken, the merging of state, society, and economy encapsulated in the economic state is of the most serious consequence as it “has undermined independent decision-making on the part of the state, something upon which its very existence depends. … All recent economic policy clearly demonstrates this corrosive process: it amounts to a plethora of me
革命不会被理论化:新自由主义思想和过渡问题
新自由主义是一个众所周知的有争议的术语,甚至在那些主要赞同它的人(主要是它的批评者)中,激烈的争论持续存在于它的性质,如何正确地研究它,以及它是否仍然是理解当代世界和可能出现的“后新自由主义”的适当概念武器(Davies & Gane, 2021)。新自由主义应该如何定义——一种符合福柯治理学讲座精神的治理理性(福柯,2008),一种特定政策的组合,或者一种跨国资本恢复和保护利润率的战略(哈维,2005)——不仅存在争议,而且在什么层面上研究它,要么是“实际存在的新自由主义”(布伦纳和西奥多,2002;Cahill, 2014),一套理论和论点,或两者兼而有之。我这篇论文的出发点和重点是新自由主义思想,它以弗里德里希·哈耶克、米尔顿·弗里德曼、德国自由主义者以及詹姆斯·布坎南(James Buchanan)的著作为代表。我的目标是发展一种对新自由主义思想的批判性描述,这种描述将避免明确的规范性批评,而是选择一种更间接但更有效的、有点新颖的批评,这种批评将新自由主义坚持到自己的标准,并展示它是如何无法满足这些标准的,或者在试图这样做的过程中被推入高度可疑的立场。论点如下:如前所述,新自由主义的意义备受争议,因此我将通过对新自由主义的简要描述来提供我的论点的基础,新自由主义依赖于对其在20世纪中叶左右出现的背景的理论-历史重建。我从这种重构中得出的结论是,我们最好不要过分缩小新自由主义的范围,也不要淡化其内部的异质性。因此,与其试图将一些理论或立场作为典型的新自由主义,甚至认为它们是新自由主义的“本质”,我认为,统一新自由主义话语的不是一套积极的信念——尽管在某些领域有一些重大的重叠——而是一个与功能市场的先决条件有关的共同问题。根据新自由主义思想家的观点,在所有问题中,民主是最紧迫的问题之一,因为几乎所有人都同意,民主使建立和确保市场运作的任务变得复杂。然而,尽管有这种基本的共识,新自由主义对民主的描述显示出相当大范围的关于其功能失调甚至病态的性质和来源的具体诊断。因此,本文的第二步是对一些由新自由主义者领导的民主批判路线的调查。除其他事项外,这项调查有助于我们欣赏新自由主义思想的异质性,但更重要的是,就我的目的而言,它还让我们了解到新自由主义者对民主的深刻保留以及他们批判的尖锐本质。由于新自由主义者对民主的具体批评各不相同,因此提出的补救措施和改革建议也各不相同。因此,在接下来的步骤中,我们将仔细审查几个选定的改革建议,从含糊的呼吁“强大的国家”到哈耶克的“模范宪法”,以及更具体的关于引入宪法平衡预算修正案的论点,这是布坎南的标志性要求。这项调查向我们展示了新自由主义改革建议的激进本质,这对我的整体论点很重要。尽管所有这些改革建议都具有高度争议性的含义,但我将故意放弃直接基于规范性论点进行讨论。相反,我的批评集中在新自由主义诊断和各自补救措施之间缺失的分析联系上。为了说明这一点,本文的第四部分也是最后一部分将注意力转移到新自由主义转型的政治上,也就是说,这种政治是否以及如何在新自由主义的描述中理论化。再一次,哈耶克、欧肯和布坎南之间存在一定程度的差异,但这里的共同点是无法在不违反各自的批判性诊断假设的情况下将这种政治理论化,或者超越自由民主的范围作为实施这种改革的条件。因此,我想在下文中捍卫的关键论点是,新自由主义思想对所谓的过渡问题缺乏任何合理的解决方案——如果他们愿意对此进行反思的话这些发现导致了几种不同的解释,或多或少具有深远的影响,将在结论部分讨论。如今,注意到新自由主义一词的争议性和潜在的空洞性是司空见惯的。 面对这些指控,研究新自由主义的学者往往急于对新自由主义给出某种可行的定义,以免人们怀疑他们是在用一个带有政治意义而非分析意义的空洞能指来操作。因此,一套政策——通常以华盛顿共识的议程为中心——被认为是典型的新自由主义,某些想法或原则被认为构成了其核心或本质,或者,新自由主义仅仅是蒙特·普勒林协会成员颁布的,这是一种优雅的,但经过仔细检查,并不是完全令人信服的方式来规避问题(乔姆斯基,1999;克劳奇,2011;Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009)。另一方面,学者们经常介入,强调新自由主义的巨大可变性/可转化性,以及它与其他政治-智力项目形成或多或少充满紧张的融合的特征能力,这使得似乎不可能,或者至少在智力上是不谨慎的,旨在“固定”新自由主义及其含义的一些硬性和快速的定义:“新自由主义的清晰、明确的本质主义定义已被证明是难以捉摸的”(Peck, 2010,第8页)。我自己对新自由主义的描述将试图在过于简约的定义尝试(在更仔细的审查下无法维持)和分析失败主义的解决方案之间取得平衡,将新自由主义分解为各种各样的新自由主义,据称这些新自由主义除了维特根斯坦家族的相似性之外没有任何共同点。我的概念方法的出发点是观察到新自由主义如今已经成为一个真正有害的标签,因此,首先看看那些在当时将自己描述为新自由主义者的人(尽管是短暂而不情愿的),并澄清他们贴上“新自由主义”标签的知识和政治议程,可能会有所帮助。换句话说,有必要重建新自由主义出现的知识和政治背景。出现的过程不是单一的起源,而是分散的,新自由主义也是如此。然而,我们有可能将Walter Lippmann会议确定为新自由主义的“诞生”,因为它是这些过程的第一个顶点,也是这个术语第一次被正式采用的事件,它表示参与者的共同议程,其中不仅包括Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke和Alexander r<e:1> stow,还包括Jacques Rueff, Louis Rougier(会议召集人),当然还有Walter Lippmann本人。在这一点上,关于Colloque的一个令人印象深刻的奖学金存在,所以没有必要进入程序的细节(见Burgin, 2012;Dardot & Laval, 2013;Innset, 2020;Reinhoudt & Audier, 2018)。从他们身上浮现出的整体图景是一种处于防御状态的自由主义,它试图重新获得真正竞争者的地位,以对抗其主要对手集体主义和当时的凯恩斯主义(程度较低)。在除了路德维希·冯·米塞斯之外的几乎所有参与者的眼中,这一努力的前提是对古典自由主义议程进行批判性的修订,而且,最值得注意的是,放弃简单的公式,如“自由放任”,或者一些人所说的“曼彻斯特主义”。因此,这里形成的新自由主义话语与“自我调节市场”的信条相去甚远。相反,新自由主义方法的全部要点是,肯定市场的价值,反对集体主义者和凯恩斯主义者,同时坚持认为,它们远不如自由主义传统的大部分人在这一点上倾向于相信的那样强大和自我维持。更明确地说,市场本身并不是解决所有问题的办法;相反,市场本身变成了新自由主义思想的一个问题,因为它被视为一个需要持续关注的实体,并以许多先决条件为前提。因此,我所说的新自由主义的问题与功能市场的先决条件有关,也就是说,价格机制尽可能不受干扰地支配的市场新自由主义话语的不可简化的异质性不仅仅是由于这个问题可以被阐明和解决的多种多样的,有时是相互矛盾的方式。然而,显而易见的是,新自由主义思想可能以市场概念为中心,但那些工作被这个问题所激发的人的智力能量,如布坎南、哈耶克或德国的自由主义者,不可避免地被吸引到需要到位的基础设施上,并为这些市场的运作抵御不断变化的对手。这是社会和政治的领域,因此,对新自由主义者来说,投入如此多的时间来概念化国家和民主是严格的。 对于这样一个提议的影响,这是否是一个现实的场景,可以更详细地讨论,就像与之相关的规范性问题一样,但根据我最初提出的批评策略,我将把自己限制在这个快速的阐述中,然后继续讨论第二个更详细的改革提议,即哈耶克的“模范宪法”(哈耶克,2003,第105-127页)。哈耶克建议的主要内容是恢复政府和立法机构之间严格的权力分离。他的诊断对两者的合并提出了问题,因此,真正的两院制必须重新建立,立法机关只通过适当意义上的法律,限制政府享有的自由裁量行动的空间。在这种制度设计实践的许多值得注意的方面中,我将只强调一个特别有趣的方面,它也引起了相当多的批评:在许多方面,管理大会在其主要特征上与经验上存在的政府几乎没有什么不同,尽管哈耶克在政府选举中认真地考虑剥夺任何从国家获得转移或工资的人的公民权(哈耶克,2003年,第120页)。尽管如此,批评的主要目标是立法机关的选举规则,这可以说是在这个新的制度设置中真正的权力所在地,因为政府议会将严格“受立法议会制定的公正行为规则的约束”(哈耶克,2003,第119页)。立法机关的议员按下列方式选举:每年,全体年满45岁的公民在其人口群体中选出自己的代表,以代替任期满15年的即将离任的立法委员。哈耶克所记住的是“一个组装在一个相对成熟的年龄的男性和女性当选相当长的时间,如十五年,所以他们不会re-eligible也被迫回到谋生的市场,但保证持续公共就业等敬语但中立的立场躺法官,这期间担任议员他们会依赖政党支持和关心他们的个人的未来”(哈耶克2003,p . 113)。这种设计背后的基本原理非常清楚。长期任期、不能连任和保证未来就业,都是为了尽量减少代表立法者从事寻租行为的动机,此外,据称年龄群体的结构原则将排除在立法机构内形成政党关系。即使他们形成了,“那些倾向于不同党派的人将被诱导一起讨论问题,并将意识到他们有代表他们这一代人的观点的共同任务……”(哈耶克,2003年,第118页)。显然,从民主理论的角度来看,这一激进的提议会受到许多批评,但让我们把它放在一边,转而考虑这里要考虑的最后一个提议,这也是最不具体的,它呼吁将国家地位转变为其主要支持者亚历山大·<s:1>斯托(Alexander rstow)和沃尔特·欧肯(Walter Eucken)所说的“强国家”。这种补救措施体现了对过度多元化的批判性诊断的严格结论,这种诊断在大多数世界自由主义者中普遍存在;甚至在这个主题上较少发声的Röpke也提醒他的读者,“这种不健康的多元主义的巨大危险是压力集团贪婪地包围国家”,“任何负责任的政府都必须仔细检查所有可能的手段,以抵制这种多元化的国家解体”(Röpke, 1960, pp. 144, 143)。尽管如此,最强烈的要求强大国家的呼声还是来自他的自由主义同胞<s:1>斯托夫和欧肯。前者在1932年的演讲《国家政策与经济自由主义的必要条件》中总结道:“我和我的朋友们所提倡的新自由主义要求一个强大的国家,一个凌驾于经济之上、凌驾于利益团体之上、在其所属之地的国家。以这种对促进自由主义经济政策的强大国家的信仰忏悔和-因为两者相互制约-促进强大国家的自由主义经济政策,我想以这种忏悔结束”(r<e:1>斯托,2017b,第149页)。因此,国家要把自己从政党和利益集团的多元仇恨中解脱出来,并采取一种立场,使它能够抵御来自这些行动者的要求。同年,欧肯出版了《国家的结构转型与资本主义的危机》,这本书后来被认为是世界自由主义传统的奠基之作。 在这篇内容广泛的文章中,Eucken提出了他自己版本的自由主义衰落叙事,在他看来,这恰好与卡尔·施密特(Carl Schmitt)在这方面的观点相吻合,并在“自由国家向经济国家的转变”中脱颖而出(Eucken, 2017,第59页)。在欧肯看来,经济国家中国家、社会和经济的融合是最严重的后果,因为它“破坏了国家的独立决策,而这正是国家存在所依赖的。”最近所有的经济政策都清楚地表明了这一有害的过程:它相当于过度的自我
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