Contents and Introduction to my PhD thesis

thesis-contents.md

Spirits That Speak Through The Ornamentation of Banknotes: Neoliberalism, Capitalism, Religion

Submitted to printing 30 September 2011

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Vagueness of Neoliberalism
3. The Political Theology of Neoliberalism: Schmitt, Ordo-liberalism in Weimar and After
4. Neoliberalism as Religion
5. Communitarian Reason
6. Communitarianism in Practice: Neoliberal Communitarianism from Blair to the Big Society
7. Conclusion

Introduction

In 2008, appearing before a congressional hearing, the former head of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan made an astonishing admission. Asked if his beliefs in the unrivalled power of free markets had prevented him from seeing the possibility of the 2008 global financial crisis, Greenspan responded that this may be the case, that there may be a “flaw in the model that I believed is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works”.

While a moment of surprising ideological collapse from a man normally so bullish about the virtues of free markets, on of the most interesting things was the way in which this speech was reported by the Seattle Times. The headline read: “Worshippers at Church of Free Market suffer crisis of faith”¹. This comparison, that Greenspan had put too much trust in his worldview and that this trust was quasi religion felt right. The headline worked – no one misunderstood or doubted what was meant. Such comparisons certainly intensified since the 2008 crash, with the resort to religious language becoming more common. For example, Left-wing academic Noam Chomsky called for people to “discredit such destructive ideas as the market religion”². In a piece praising Marx for The Spectator, Rowan Williams wrote that “modern financial culture [..] are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens”³. Modern financial culture needs its systematic disbelievers subjecting the religion to scrutiny.

Since at least the anti-globalisation movement, the specific form of political economics know as neoliberalism has been spoken of as in some sense ‘religious’. Joseph Stiglitz talked of ‘free market fundamentalism’⁴. Sub Commandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico spoke of fighting neoliberalism as a battle against a ‘new religion’⁵.

What was at stake in these claims? Why does it make sense to use religious language to describe these allegedly secular events? There seems to be an intuitive charge to this application that is quite difficult to define. Is it because it is accurate, or because it allows the producer of the quote to mock powers entirely out of their control? Neoliberalism is said to be the cause of the financial crisis, the rule of markets that dominates whole cities and unleashes a planet of slums. Why talk of this like a religion, when surely it directs so many human lives towards ill.

This thesis takes these rhetorical commonplaces seriously. It asks: in what sense is neoliberalism religious? Does neoliberalism have religious elements? Why do people make this comparison?

Clearly there are numerous approaches one can make to the question. There are few that this thesis is not.

This thesis is not a work of Christian ethical theology. It claims the standpoint of no religion to makes its points. This does not mean the content and conclusions of this thesis will not be of interest to the religious reader. Rather, on the contrary it is well known that God tends not to be well disposed to those who produce false idols.

This thesis is also not a genealogy of the concept of the economy with regard to this question. Neither is it a book of economic thought. Neither is it biblical study of the divine economy against the human one. Rather I hope it is a thesis of continental philosophy of religion, in the lineage of Phillip Goodchild’s work and Alberto Tosacno’s Fanaticism work⁶. It combines therefore both historical critical research with abstraction philosophical reasoning to answer the question: in what, if any sense is neoliberalism religious?

The approach of this thesis could be considered to be like climbing the mountain of the thesis question and therefore of neoliberalism from multiple angles, all the while attempting to gain a vantage point from which to understand and perhaps even resist it.

The opening two chapters consider the question from a historical angle.

In the first chapter I enquire as to the nature of neoliberalism. This requires me to consider a number of difficult terminological and technical issues within the literature that regard the idea of ‘neoliberalism’ as being too conceptually slippery to be analytically or even politically useful. Neoliberalism is apparently everywhere, but very few people seem to be able to say at all what it is with any degree of clarity. I conclude that the best approach is to consider in detail the networked relationships of neoliberalism at its origin in the Mont Pèlerin Society. This methodological choice shows that neoliberalism is a far wider and richer concept than has been previously thought. Neoliberalism is best seen as a networked or family concept that has a number of branches that interact. This opens the possibility that historically neoliberalism may have contained religious inspiration. Indeed, this appears to have been the intention of at least some of its progenitors and advocates.

In the second chapter, I explore this possibility by considering in detail by considering the geographically German version of neoliberalism, ordo-liberalism. One of the branches of neoliberalism identified in the first chapter, ordo-liberalism in particular formulates the arguments for neoliberalism in a normative and ethical manner, using arguments drawn from Christianity. In particular, ordo-liberalism draws from the work of Carl Schmitt and the concept of political theology with regard to the state and elements of distributism and early Catholic social teaching. That neoliberalism has elements of religious discourse within it from the beginning is a break through in the thesis. The existence of ordo-liberalism explains some of the ideological success of neoliberalism as a whole. It has been well documented that neoliberalism appealed to a concept of ‘freedom’ in its justification. Ordo-liberalism shows how thicker ethico-religious concepts are bound up in its reproduction and allows us to explain some of its longevity through this. Rather than appealing to hopeless and sterile abstractions, the German case shows how neoliberalism appealed to rich religious concepts of human flourishing as a means of persuading people to its cause.

I then move in a slightly sideways and abstract direction to consider the common rhetoric that neoliberalism is a religion, the tropes surrounding its fundamentalism, its fanaticism and so forth.

In chapter three I consider the ways in which parallel comparisons have been made – between economics and religion (even genealogically), between religion and capitalism and between consumerism and religion. I consider the inadequacies and strengths of these approaches to the peculiar concept of neoliberalism, examining the problems with the definition of the term religion itself that are vexatious to my process. Post-structuralist theorists of religion suggest that naming a definite set of social practices as religious is a political act. For example, the construction of religion itself was an act within historical time to reinforce the political practice of colonialism. In naming neoliberalism as religious, actors perform a political act. In contrast to historical cases where naming the religious is a tool of oppression, this naming is one of resistance.

In the final two chapters I consider a form of politics widely embraced by religious groups and the possibility that it may brook resistance to neoliberalism: communitarianism. This considers the question from the opposite pole. The considerable enthusiasm for communitarianism flows from many factors, not least the pre-existing historical proximity between Aristotelian forms of reasoning and Christianity. In particular communitarianism is attractive as it is it allows a form of politics that is distinctively about a particular community – the church – that does not sit cleanly on the poles of left or right, but is rather a distinctive and sacred formulation.

Considering the work of Alasdair MacIntyre in detail, in part because he is so clearly opposed to modernity, I suggest that despite some aspects of communitarian politics being positive, serious theoretical problems lead it to become so porous that neoliberalism is able to rush into the gaps.

In the next chapter, I then examine two instances of religiously inflected communitarian politics, Tony Blair’s New Labour project and the recent Big Society project of David Cameron’s government. While both are sincerely communitarian forms of politics,  despite their rhetorical opposition to neoliberalism, they only serve to entrench and even extend neoliberal policies. The warning here is explicit: though a form of politics surrounding community may seem incredibly attractive and have resonances with religious beliefs, this does not mean that it is not capable of co-adoption. Indeed, bringing the thesis full circle, the ordo-liberal concept of a religiously informed type of neoliberalism that spoke the values of community and even brooked direct criticism of capitalism, provides a precise historical template. Neoliberalism turns out to be a far more subtle concept than anticipated and waving the baton of Aristotelian communitarianism is not sufficient opposition.

I conclude by suggesting future directions for research into the questions of this thesis. Most significantly, the need to further uncover of the role of religion in the propagation of neoliberalism, something that will inform the best self-critical religious opposition. If it means anything, the post-secular turn means not treating the most prominent ideology in contemporary politics as if it is exclusively secular, but examining the role of religion in its reproduction, both in the traditional sense of the term and the exploded sense I detail.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Dickie, “Worshippers at the Church of the Free Market suffer crisis of faith”. ↩

2. Nuo and Zhouxiang, “Bury the free market religion”. ↩

3. Williams, “Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism”. ↩

4. Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents. ↩

5. Marcos, “The Fourth World War”. ↩

6. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and religion: the price of piety  (London: Routledge, 2002); ———, Theology of money  (London: SCM Press Ltd, 2007). Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: on the uses of an idea  (London: Verso, 2010). ↩