Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory
130
Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory
130eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis?
In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure.
These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth—and twentieth—century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day.
“A brilliant and urgent assessment of democracy’s current crisis and capitalism’s increasing authoritarianism. . . . a profound diagnosis of this moment’s political ills.” —Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It's Gone
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226597300 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Series: | TRIOS |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 130 |
| Sales rank: | 123,882 |
| File size: | 422 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Neoliberalism's Frankenstein
Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century "Democracies"
Wendy Brown
"A new political science is needed for a world altogether new," Tocqueville famously wrote in 1835. Tocqueville was not denying either the historicity of the new order or the relevance of past thinkers to grasping it; his own work strongly featured both. Rather, his point was that extant modes and categories of political understanding could not capture the predicates, characteristics, and dynamics comprising the most important political emergence of his time: democracy.
We face something similar today in the disintegration, or at least transmogrification, of liberal democracy by forces for which we do not yet have adequate names. I am not speaking only of the eruption of extreme right movements and parties in mainstream political life. How are we to theorize, or even characterize, the transformations of popular sovereignty forged by novel fusions of social, political, technological, and economic powers? To capture the dilutions of state sovereignty and the disorienting interregnum between nation-states and whatever their successors might be? To fathom the resurgence of religious forces in politics and the challenges to the identification of liberal democracy with secularism? What is the bearing on democratic commitments of the intensification of organized nonstate transnational political violence? What of the extraordinary new powers of digital communication — their effects on political subjectivities, identities, allegiances, and alliances? What kinds of subjects, societies, states, and political discourses have emanated from four decades of neoliberal governmentality and three decades of financialization? What is the effect on democratic imaginaries of an unprecedentedly integrated and complex global order, on the one hand, and the specter of planetary finitude, on the other?
The necessity of new theoretical vocabularies and registers to apprehend these novel powers, constellations, and specters does not consign the critical theory archive to the dustbin. It is in any event impossible to invent, de novo, a critical theory of the Now, and a foolish ambition to develop a comprehensive theoretical account of our times. Nor can we simply lift ourselves by our metaphysical bootstraps out of our learned ways of interpreting the world, or substitute neologisms for the difficult work of theoretical insight. As we draw our extant critical theories toward explaining the present, illumination may rest, paradoxically, in drawing up short before what they cannot explain; in dwelling, however uncomfortably, in that disorienting, even stupefying place; in essaying experimental combinations and juxtapositions of theorists and disciplines long been held apart by vigilantly policed orthodoxies. A "new critical theory for a world itself quite new" will require contributions from history, religion, anthropology, political economy, social theory, and psychoanalysis as well as politics and philosophy — each of which will in turn be augmented by this breaking down of boundaries.
Opening to the novelties of our political age also brings into focus the occlusions, and not just the supersession, of our own previous work in critical theory. What powers did we fail to track and thematize that have now exploded as enraged white masculinist nationalism in the context of global movements of capital and peoples? Or have taken shape as plutocratic-populist alliances braided together by moralization and marketization? As nihilistic mobilizations of "traditional" morality? As an antipolitics releasing a ferocious will to power in politics? As disinhibited aggression in political and social life?
Developing a new critical theory is daunting. Yet the inordinate privilege of being scholars of this world demands that we try, however haltingly and despite all risk of failure. The work will be inevitably haphazard and partial, always tethered by specific problems or questions and inflected by specific intellectual dispositions, knowledges, and limitations. In these ways, developing new critical theory for our new age is an inherently common project, albeit not necessarily a collective one.
The following is one very preliminary effort to theorize the emergence of "authoritarian freedom" today.
* * *
I want to give France its freedom back. I want to take it out of jail.
MARINE LE PEN, APRIL 2017
I joined UKIP because I believe it is the only party that truly values freedom and aspiration. UKIP is about more than independence from the EU. It is about independence from an Orwellian interventionist nanny state; it is about independence for the individual. It is the only party that believes in personal responsibility and equality of opportunity not of outcome. It is the only party that places trust in people not politicians and the bureaucratic class.
ALEXANDRA SWANN, MARCH 2012
I introduced my twenty-three-year-old law student daughter ... to Milo [Yiannopoulos]'s videos, and she says he makes her feel relieved. And natural. And for me, he is like a loose flowery shirt in an all-plaid environment.
NAME WITHHELD, PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE WITH AUTHOR
A predominantly white, uneducated, evangelical Christian population, animated by discontent, rage, woundedness, or all three, brought Donald Trump to power. Yes, he also drew support from some educated whites, racial minorities, the ultrarich, the ultra-Zionist, and the alt-right. But his electoral base was and remains white American voters without a college degree, many of whom forthrightly acknowledged that he was unqualified to be president. He mobilized not simply class resentment but white rancor, especially white male rancor, provoked by lost pride of place (social, economic, cultural, and political) in the context of four decades of neoliberalism and globalization.
In fact, neoliberalism, and post-Fordism before it, have been far more devastating to the black American working class. In 1970 more than two-thirds of urban black workers had blue-collar jobs; by 1987 that had dropped to 28 percent. In addition to rising un- and underemployment, poor and working-class black neighborhoods were hard hit by neoliberal defunding of public schools, services, and welfare benefits and by draconian sentencing mandates for nonviolent crimes. Together, these resulted in an exploding drug and gang economy, a catastrophic black incarceration rate, and a growing chasm between a small black middle class and the rest of African America. But this devastation is the stuff of broken promises, not backward-looking rancor about lost supremacy or entitlement, not crushed political and social imagos of the self, the race, and the nation.
Clearly, white backlash against socioeconomic dethronement by neoliberal economic policy and what Marine Le Pen termed "savage globalization" is rampant across the Euro-Atlantic zone, where white working- and middle-class inhabitants, facing declining access to decent incomes, housing, schools, pensions, and futures, have risen up in political rebellion against both imagined dark usurpers and the cosmopolitans and elites they hold responsible for throwing open the doors of their nations and throwing them away. This much we know. But what is the political form of this anger and its mobilization? The old terms bandied about to describe it — populism, authoritarianism, fascism — fail to capture the strange brew of bellicosity, disinhibition, and an antidemocratic blend of license and support for statism in current political and social formations. Nor do they identify the specific elements of neoliberal reason — a radically extended reach of the private, mistrust of the political, and disavowal of the social, which together normalize inequality and disembowel democracy — that shape and legitimize these angry white right political passions. And they do not capture the deep nihilism that makes values into playthings, truth inconsequential, and the future a matter of indifference or, worse, an unconscious object of destruction.
In what follows, I explore this conjuncture from just one angle: what generates the antipolitical yet libertarian and authoritarian dimensions of popular right-wing reaction today? What novel iterations and expressions of freedom have been wrought from the conjuncture of neoliberal reason, aggrieved white male power, nationalism, and unavowed nihilism? How has freedom become the calling card and the energizing force of a formation so manifestly unemancipatory, routinely characterized as heralding "illiberal democracy" in its attacks on equal rights, civil liberties, constitutionalism, and basic norms of tolerance and inclusion, and in its affirmations of white nationalism, strong statism, and authoritarian leadership? How and why have freedom and illiberalism, freedom and authoritarianism, freedom and legitimized social exclusion and social violence, become fused in our time? How has this fusion developed its appeal and modest legitimacy in formerly liberal democratic nations? This essay does not provide the genealogy that would answer these questions comprehensively, but offers a first foray. It follows several historical tributaries and builds on the unlikely theoretical trio of Friedrich Hayek, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Marcuse: Hayek for an account of the political rationality of our time, Nietzsche and Marcuse for accounts of the rancorous, disinhibited, antisocial, and nihilistic aggression exploding within it.
The Logics and Effects of Neoliberal Reason
Neoliberalism is commonly understood as a set of economic policies promoting unrestricted actions, flows, and accumulations of capital by means of low tariffs and taxes, deregulation of industries, privatization of formerly public goods and services, stripped-out welfare states, and the breakup of organized labor. Foucault and others have also taught us to grasp neoliberalism as a governing rationality generating distinctive kinds of subjects, forms of conduct, and orders of social meaning and value. Different from ideology — a distortion or mystification of reality — neoliberal rationality is productive, world-making: it economizes every sphere and human endeavor, and it replaces a model of society based on the justice-producing social contract with a conception of society organized as markets and of states oriented by market requirements. As neoliberal rationality becomes our ubiquitous common sense, its principles not only govern through the state but suffuse workplaces, schools, hospitals, gyms, air travel, policing, and all manner of human desire and decisions. Higher education, for example, is reconfigured by neoliberal rationality as an investment by human capital in the enhancement of its own future value, a transformation that makes literally unintelligible the idea and practice of education as a democratic public good. Everything in universities is affected by this — tuition levels and budget priorities, of course, but also curricula, teaching and research practices, hiring and admissions criteria, and administrative concerns and conduct. The coordinates of ostensibly liberal democratic nations are similarly reformatted. For example, soon after his 2017 election, French prime minister Emmanuel Macron declared his determination to make France a nation that "thinks and moves like a startup." Across the ocean, Jared Kushner, leader of the White House Office of American Innovation, tasked with "fixing government with business ideas," proclaimed, "The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens."
What is the specific formulation of freedom carried by neoliberal reason? This varies across different thinkers and instantiations of neoliberalism, but some generalizations can be made. Most obviously, as freedom is submitted to market meanings, it is stripped of the political valences that attach it to popular sovereignty and thus to democracy. Instead, freedom is equated wholly with the pursuit of private ends, is appropriately unregulated, and is largely exercised to enhance the value, competitive positioning, or market share of a person or firm. Its sole political significance is negative: it flourishes where politics, and especially government, are absent. As neoliberal reason reconfigures freedom's meaning, subjects, and objects in this way, it denigrates the left as opposed to freedom tout court, not just in markets. A brief turn to the founding neoliberals will allow us to grasp this move more precisely.
Neoliberal thought was born in the shadow of European fascism and Soviet totalitarianism. However significant their epistemological and ontological differences, the Ordoliberal, Freiburg, and Chicago School thinkers who founded the Mont Pelerin Society shared the conviction that these dark formations were on a continuum with the pervasive social planning and state-managed political economies of their time. Keynesian welfare states, social democracy, and public ownership all lie on the "road to serfdom." They represent the related dangers of, on the one hand, elevating the notion of the social and conceiving nations in terms of society rather than individuals and, on the other, interfering with the spontaneous order of interdependence and need provision generated by giving individual liberty the widest possible berth.
Why the attack on society and the social? For neoliberals, as Margaret Thatcher famously intoned, society does not exist. Thatcher's intellectual lodestar, Friedrich Hayek, decried "the social" as a term at once mythical, incoherent, and dangerous, falsely anthropomorphizing and drawing on animism too. What makes belief in the realm of the social so nefarious for Hayek is that it inevitably leads to attempts to make justice and order by design. This in turn undermines the dynamic order delivered by the combination of markets and morals, neither of which emanate from reason or intention; rather, both spontaneously evolve. Moreover, since justice pertains to conduct comporting with universal rules, it is a misnomer when applied to the condition or state of a people, as in the term "social justice." Social justice, then, is misguided, assaults freedom in spirit and in fact, and assaults traditional morality as it inevitably attempts to replace it with one group's idea of the Good.
Apart from its role in implementing misguided social policy, why do neoliberals also oppose the political? For Milton Friedman, the twin threat of political life to freedom rests in its inherent concentration of power, which markets disperse, and its fundamental reliance on coercion, whether by rule or dictate, whereas markets feature choice. While he acknowledges that some measure of political power is indispensable for stable, secure societies and even for the existence and health of markets (property and contract law, monetary policy, and so forth), every political act, rule, or mandate is, for Friedman, a subtraction from individual freedom. Even direct democracy, whenever it falls short of unanimity, compromises freedom, as it imposes the will of the majority on the minority. Markets, by contrast, always allow individual preferences to prevail — the equivalent of always getting what one votes for rather than having to submit to majorities. Friedman writes:
The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no values, no "social" responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest — whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform.
Hayek, too, regarded political life as compromising individual liberty and the spontaneous order and progress it generates when disciplined (hence "responsibilized") by competition. This is more than a brief for limited government. Rather, for Hayek, politics as such, and democracy in particular, limit freedom as they concentrate power, constrain individual action, disrupt spontaneous order, and distort the natural incentives, distributions, and hence health of markets. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, he commences with this epigram from Walter Lippmann: "In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."
Yet even this way of putting the matter, insofar as it focuses on the state and economy, understates the texture and the venue of neoliberal freedom, in which deregulation and privatization become broad moral-philosophical principles extending well beyond the economy. As these principles take hold, constraints on freedom in the name of civility, equality, inclusion, or public goods, and above all in the name of what Hayek terms "the dangerous superstition" of social justice, are on a continuum with fascism and totalitarianism. To understand this, we need to consider Hayek's stipulation of freedom more closely.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Authoritarianism"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Critical Theory in an Authoritarian Age
Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky
NEOLIBERALISM’S FRANKENSTEIN
Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century “Democracies”
Wendy Brown
THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY REVISITED
Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump
Peter E. Gordon
RADICAL CRITIQUE AND LATE EPISTEMOLOGY
Tocqueville, Adorno, and Authoritarianism
Max Pensky
