THE POLITICAL AND THE ECONOMIC
Thus far, I have distinguished two forms of political theology at work in Schmitt’s foundational text. The first is a restricted form focused on sovereignty and the transition from the medieval to the modern, which has largely set the agenda for research in the field. The second is a more general form of which the restricted form is only a narrow subset, which would study the parallels between political and theological or metaphysical discourse as rooted in the interminable struggle with what can be variously called the problem of evil or the problem of legitimacy. I have also provided a broad overview of what it would mean to view neoliberalism as a political-theological paradigm in the broader sense and some initial indication of the advantages such an approach might have over the dominant Marxist and Foucauldian interpretations of neoliberalism.
At the same time, I have identified a major obstacle to any attempt to view neoliberalism through a political-theological lens: the field’s deeply polemical relationship to the economic realm. My task in this chapter will be to show that this bias against the economic, just like the bias in favor of sovereignty and medieval-to-modern genealogies, is an arbitrary one that leads the field into unnecessary contradictions and aporias. At bottom, my argument is based on my conviction that one of the most attractive things about political theology is the way it overcomes—or, perhaps more accurately, shows a principled disregard for—simplistic binaries. In connection with the political-economic binary in particular, a political-theological account promises a nonreductionist account of the role of economics in the neoliberal order.
If all I wanted was a theoretical apparatus for interpreting the economic dynamics of the neoliberal order, of course, I should look no further than Marxism. David Harvey’s influential account is a case in point: virtually no other interpreters of neoliberalism show anywhere near the same confidence and rigor in their handling of economic material. At the same time, I have already pointed out that Harvey seems to have difficulty specifying what is unique about neoliberalism. His Marxist approach leads him to view political institutions and ideology as superstructures that ultimately only reflect the more fundamental economic base or mode of production—but once we leave aside neoliberalism’s explicit ideology and political ambitions, what is left but the same old story of capitalism? In Dardot and Laval’s words, “Trapped in a conception that makes the ‘logic of capital’ an autonomous motor of history, [Marxists] reduce the latter to the sheer repetition of the same scenarios, with the same characters in new costumes and the same plots in new settings.”1 This economic reductionism “presupposes that the ‘bourgeoisie’ is an historical subject which persists over time; that it pre-exists the relations of struggle it engages in with other classes; and that it was sufficient for it to apprise, influence, and corrupt politicians for them to abandon Keynesian policies and compromise formulas between labor and capital.”2 Such a simplistic narrative is belied by Harvey’s own “recognition of the fact that classes have been profoundly changed during the process of neo-liberalization”—meaning that the beneficiaries cannot have planned the neoliberal push in any straightforward way.3 More than that, an economic-reductionist account ignores the decisive role of the state in the development of the neoliberal order: “To believe that ‘financial markets’ one fine day eluded the grasp of politics is nothing but a fairy tale. It was states, and global economic organizations, in close collusion with private actors, that fashioned rules conducive to the expansion of market finance.”4 In other words, politics are not epiphenomenal to economic structures but directly transform them.
Dardot and Laval are far from the first to notice a problem here. Marxists have always had an ambivalent relationship with the tendency toward economic reductionism in their intellectual tradition, by turns embracing it as the only possible basis for a scientific Marxism and distancing themselves from its more extreme implications. The most popular version of the latter strategy can be encapsulated in the notion that the economy is “determinative in the last instance,” which seems to provide some breathing room for a relative autonomy of the political-ideological “superstructure” over and against the economic-material “base.” As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue, however, such a threading of the needle ultimately fails: if the economy is determinative in the last instance, it is always determinative.5
Working in the wake of Laclau and Mouffe’s intervention, Slavoj Žižek has reconceived the material “base” more abstractly as the existence of an insoluble deadlock or obstacle that Jacques Lacan designated as “the Real.” On this basis Žižek puts forth a new vision of Marxism in which ideology critique took on an unexpectedly central role as a Hegelian critique of the Marxist tradition allowed him to move past conventional reductionism.6 Žižek has proven to be a helpful interlocutor for many working in political theology (including Eric Santner and myself),7 and that dialogue has been reciprocal insofar as Žižek has engaged extensively with theological themes in many of his writings. Yet his attempt at a synthesis of Hegel and Lacan (two thinkers who are surely already complex enough on their own) has grown more and more self-referential and unresponsive to changing political and economic realities.8 If this increasingly baroque—and still incomplete—system is what it takes to overcome Marxist reductionism, why not simply start from the nonreductionist standpoint of political theology?
Here I may seem to be knocking at an open door, however, insofar as Foucauldianism already represents a nonreductionist approach to the interplay of discursive, political, and economic forces. Foucault starts from the position that both knowledge and institutional practices contribute equally to networks of power, and in contrast to conventional political theology’s animus against the economic, he includes economic practices and techniques alongside the many other modes in which power is exercised.
With respect to the political-economic dyad that is my quarry in this chapter, then, Foucauldianism provides a model for my general theory of political theology. In the next chapter, I hope to demonstrate that political theology’s focus on the sources of legitimacy—which carries with it a focus on moral agency, responsibility, and obligation—can help supplement the Foucauldian account of neoliberalism by exposing the way that neoliberalism presents itself as a moral order of the world and “hooks” us by exploiting our moral intuitions.
My first step down that path will be a consideration of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, which attempts to combine a Foucauldian analysis with an account of popular sovereignty in order to hold open the hope of overcoming neoliberalism. In this respect Brown is already pushing Foucault toward something very much like political theology, but she does so at the cost of reaffirming the very political-economic binary I am seeking to overcome. After analyzing the disadvantages of this binary for Brown’s project, I will trace the roots of her approach in Arendt. I will then turn to two contemporary thinkers, Giorgio Agamben and Dotan Leshem, who both attempt, in their own ways, to investigate the relationship between the political and the economic by means of a synthesis of Arendt and Foucault and who both end up in similar deadlocks as Brown. Having established that the political-economic dyad that I call “Arendt’s axiom” leads to a dead end, I will take up a variety of alternative proposals that seem to me to point toward the possibility of a political theology that operates outside that misleading binary. Finally, I will conclude the chapter by arguing that there is actually no stable political-economic binary but rather that it serves as a kind of “container” for a series of more fundamental binaries that different political-theological paradigms sort out and combine in different ways.
Demonizing Neoliberalism
In the lectures collected under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault, writing at a time when neoliberalism was just starting to cohere into a governing rationality, approaches the topic with some equanimity and even fascination. In fact, though most Foucauldians have used these lectures as the starting point for a harsh critique of the neoliberal order, some commentators have detected in Foucault’s stance a deep sympathy for neoliberalism as an alternative to the apparatuses of control represented by the welfare state.9
Future scholars will detect no such ambiguity in Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos. Writing not only amid the wreckage of the Global Financial Crisis but as a witness to neoliberalism’s shockingly rapid reconsolidation of power in the wake of that catastrophe, Brown evinces not even the most grudging appreciation of the mechanisms of neoliberal hegemony. A voice crying out in the wilderness, Brown wants her readers to recognize the profound danger that neoliberalism represents. This danger is bigger than any of the well-known features of the neoliberal agenda: the erosion of welfare protections, the ever-accelerating income inequality, and so forth. Though she does not explicitly use the term, one is tempted to claim that she is pointing to an ontological danger—the danger that a crucial part of what we have come to regard as human nature might be permanently eclipsed. Specifically, neoliberalism threatens to undo our sense that human beings are creatures who can collectively rule themselves, and more insidiously still, to make us forget that we ever could have wanted to do something so improbable.
Brown situates her project of resistance very explicitly in terms of the political-economic binary. In the opening of her first chapter she defines her investigation as “a theoretical consideration of the ways that neoliberalism, a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms, is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy . . . converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.”10 In defining this distinction, which structures her entire argument, she draws on the authority of Aristotle, Marx, and Arendt, all of whom, in her account, align the economic with servitude and the political with freedom. Hence, with its one-sided emphasis on the economic to the exclusion of any other concern, neoliberalism limits human aspiration to “the limited form of human existence that Aristotle and later Hannah Arendt designated as ‘mere life’ and that Marx called life ‘confined by necessity.’ . . . Neoliberal rationality eliminates what these thinkers term ‘the good life’ (Aristotle) or ‘the true realm of freedom’ (Marx), by which they did not mean luxury, leisure, or indulgence, but rather the cultivation and expression of distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention” (43). In Brown’s account, her three authorities (joined now by John Stuart Mill) believe that “the potential of the human species is realized not through, but beyond the struggle for existence and wealth accumulation” (43). In the terms of neoliberalism’s economic reconfiguration of the human prospect, however, “there are no motivations, drives, or aspirations apart from economic ones, [and] there is nothing to being human apart from ‘mere life’” (44).
Brown identifies two major institutions in the modern West that have cultivated the space of authentic human freedom that she calls the political: the liberal-democratic state and liberal arts education. Though she acknowledges the profound failings of both, she views them as promising insofar as they keep alive the desire for real freedom, even in their very inadequacy. By contrast, the neoliberal takeover of political and educational institutions removes that aspiration even as a point of reference. Whatever remains of democratic rhetoric is hollowed out into neoliberal buzzwords—consent of the governed becomes stakeholder buy-in, public policy is reduced to the implementation of “best practices,” etc.—and education’s promise of self-cultivation and personal growth is replaced by the endless accumulation of human capital.
Hence Brown would disagree with Schmitt that “politics cannot be exterminated.”11 The danger she is warning against is precisely that the process of exterminating it is well under way. Yet in other respects there is in Brown’s account a striking resemblance to Schmitt’s concept of the political. Most notably, both Brown and Schmitt agree that the political represents the highest sphere of human existence. It is a sphere that has to do with rule—popular sovereignty for Brown, dictatorial sovereignty for Schmitt—and also with dispute. With her democratic perspective, Brown is not explicitly concerned with anything like Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction but rather with the necessary conflict of democratic politics, which is based on the general principle that the given order of things must always be open to challenge and transformation according to the will of the people.
It is here that a deeper resonance with Schmitt’s concept of the political begins to emerge. I have already noted that Brown is well aware of the failings of actual existing democratic institutions. Most galling of all, one assumes, is the fact that, at least in the major Western countries, neoliberalism was implemented by means of nominally democratic processes. A common rhetorical trope for defenders of democracy is to take the position that democracy cannot fail, it can only be failed—hence if democracy delivers a bad result, it is because the decision-making process was insufficiently democratic. Brown does not take this route. She openly acknowledges that democracy, as “political self-rule by the people, whoever the people are” (20), offers no guarantee of good outcomes. For Brown, “democracy is neither a panacea nor a complete form of political life” (210). It must depend on the support of good institutions and education, though even here there are no guarantees because of “Rousseau’s paradox: to support good institutions, the people must be antecedently what only good institutions can make them” (200). In the end there is no positive, substantive reason to prefer democracy, only the claim that if we lose it, “we lose the language and frame by which we are accountable to the present and entitled to make our own future, the language and frame with which we might contest the forces otherwise claiming that future” (210).
This defense of democracy is, if anything, even more openly tautological than Schmitt’s defense of the political: we should preserve democracy as a space of contestation because otherwise we will lose democracy as a space of contestation. If we might ask what, precisely, we are contesting, then only one answer is possible: neoliberalism as a purely economic antipolitics. Here once again we are edging into Schmitt’s territory, as Brown seems to be proposing a kind of metapolitical version of the friend-enemy distinction, a struggle between the political as such and that which threatens the political “way of life,” namely the economic. And in the end she even follows Schmitt’s lead in theologizing this struggle, setting up neoliberal economism as a false god with a “perverse theology of markets” (221) and an implacable demand for human sacrifice on the idolatrous altars of GDP and global competitiveness (216–19).
Alongside these (presumably unintentional) parallels, there is a deeper resonance with the political-theological project of tracing governing paradigms to the deep convictions of a given age. More specifically, Brown traces the root of the neoliberal paradigm to what she calls “civilizational despair”: “At the triumphal ‘end of history’ in the West, most have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and, above all, modestly under human control. . . . Ceding all power to craft the future to markets, it insists that markets ‘know best’” (221). Yet this is more like a negative political theology, because it correlates a lack of positive conviction (despair) with a lack of any political order or project (neoliberalism). This account of the rise of neoliberalism is exactly parallel to Schmitt’s account of the rise of classical liberalism. For Brown, the ideal is the good old days of Fordism rather than the good old days of early modern absolutism, but the structure is the same: for Brown as for Schmitt, the era that came after their respective ideals did not put forth a new and different political paradigm, but sowed the seeds for a demonic antipolitics. In the face of such an implacable foe, the only answer is to assert the necessity of the political as such—before it is too late.
Thus, even if Brown does not explicitly use the term, she is explicitly pushing the Foucauldian account of neoliberalism in the direction of political theology—and from my perspective, in so doing she loses what is most appealing about the Foucauldian analysis and inadvertently takes up what is most dangerous in conventional political theology. Even from a purely Foucauldian perspective, her reading of neoliberalism is questionable insofar as it is premised on a distinction between homo politicus and homo oeconomicus that Foucault does not ignore or downplay (as Brown claims) but explicitly rejects. In the Foucauldian account, economic and liberal-democratic means are both intertwined in the broader ensemble of governmental techniques that define the modern era. Insisting on a clear distinction, much less a rivalry, between the two models is not a supplement to Foucault’s analysis but a break with it.
Meanwhile, the concept of the political in Brown’s terms is so underspecified that her break with Foucault brings no clear benefit. This supposedly highest realm of human existence amounts, in the end, to the maintenance of the very possibility of resistance against neoliberalism—as though such resistance is not already happening all the time. In her demonization of neoliberalism she exaggerates its power, imagining that the most distant dreams of neoliberal ideologues are virtually a fait accompli, and the narrow window of political resistance is closing. And her vision of political resistance is almost entirely negative and backward-looking, focused on what we have lost in the transition from Fordism. Those losses are real and devastating, but Brown risks indulging in a nostalgia that can only imagine rebuilding the very institutions that neoliberalism has already proven itself quite capable of destroying.
A helpful alternative here is Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party.12 In contrast to the despair over the loss of political resistance that Brown at once diagnoses and participates in, Dean presupposes the existence of a radical political potential in the resistance movements that have erupted continually throughout the neoliberal era. The task of activists and political theorists is to take the demand for transformation embodied in movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter and help them formulate concrete programs and take on durable institutional forms. While her hope for a return to the party form could be seen as its own form of nostalgia, it is clear that Dean has in mind a renewed vision of the party that can take into account both the failures and the real successes of past movements in the course of building an institutional structure that can respond to the radically different circumstances we face in the present.
Indeed, from the perspective of Dean’s Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Brown ironically takes up a number of positions that could be viewed as distinctively neoliberal: fetishizing a concept of democracy that turns out to have little concrete content, echoing the apocalyptic rhetoric that Dean shows to fall easily off the tongues of American presidents in the neoliberal era, and arguably indulging in a paranoia about neoliberalism’s successes that resonates with the growing prominence of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics.13 The last point is most striking given the political context of Brown’s book: writing as the American neoliberal regime continued to descend into economic stagnation and political deadlock and only a few short years before energetic challenges to the neoliberal status quo erupted in both major parties, Brown nevertheless treats neoliberalism’s final victory as all but assured. Overall, what Dean says of the American left’s reaction to George W. Bush’s 2000 Electoral College victory could be repurposed as a critique of Brown’s relationship to neoliberalism: “It’s almost as if we believed in their strength and unity, their power and influence, more than they did themselves.”14
Enclosing the Economic
How do we get from Brown’s full-throated opposition to the neoliberal order to a seeming essentialization of neoliberalism that even echoes some of neoliberalism’s key rhetorical tropes? I would argue that the seeds of this unhappy result are already present in the very weapon she levels against the neoliberal order: the political-economic dyad. While her goal in deploying this binary is to keep open the space for political opposition to the neoliberal order, it has the side-effect of identifying neoliberalism with a purportedly invariant structure of human experience. This move tilts the scales in advance so that any outcome but the total and final victory of neoliberalism seems almost impossible to imagine.
To flesh out this claim, it is helpful to turn to Brown’s primary authorities: Aristotle, Marx, and Arendt. For Brown, while all three recognize that the economic provides the foundation for our biological survival, they are unanimous in privileging a sphere of life beyond the economic where the fullness of humanity (the “good life”) is to be found, a sphere called the political. As a reading of Aristotle and Arendt, this seems plausible enough, but it is difficult to understand why Brown is invoking Marx as an authority in this context. Surely Marx looks forward to something like the Aristotelian “good life,” but it makes little sense to identify that “good life” with “the political.” If anything, the “good life” of communism comes after the end of what humanity has known as the political—namely, class struggle. More than that, the development of the economic sphere does not imperil but enables the emergence of the postpolitical “good life,” which is premised on a material abundance so great that conflicts over scarce resources and coercion of labor will no longer be necessary. Doubtless Marx anticipates that development and transformation will continue and that it will be collectively self-directed, but the notion of “the political” as a space of contestation seems an odd fit. And in the meantime political struggle is directed at gaining as much control as possible over the production process and ultimately the productive apparatus itself; in other words, politics is subordinate to economic goals. It is certainly not the realm of the most authentic human self-actualization, which for Marx is found in the creative act of production—that is, once again in what Brown would see as the economic sphere.
Even this counterreading of Marx may seem artificial, however. Surely it makes more sense to say that Marx is aiming at a world in which something like the political-economic dyad would no longer obtain, where “the economic” would no longer exist as a realm of constraint and necessity and “the political” as a sphere of struggle and contestation would no longer be needed, at least not in the same way it is now. Brown’s terms are simply not a good fit here, and her attempt to force Marx into them arouses the suspicion that she is primarily concerned with recruiting Marx’s authority to shore up the left-wing credentials of a project for which Marx is not actually a major inspiration.
Far more foundational for Brown’s argument is Aristotle’s Politics, the first book of which discusses the household (oikos) and its management (oikonomia, the root of our “economy”) in relation to the city (polis, hence “politics”). This choice is odd from several perspectives. First, it is unclear why an ancient Greek text should provide guidance for a model of political life that Brown mostly associates with modern liberal-democratic states. Second, and more substantively, it is unclear why a normative philosophical treatise from a slaveholding society provides us with any particular leverage for critiquing systems of domination.
This latter concern is particularly grave when we recognize that Brown is taking the masters from that slaveholding society as the normative models of human agency. This is most striking in her chapter on liberal arts education, where references to Marx fall aside entirely in favor of a near-exclusive reliance on Aristotle’s authority. Tracing the origin of the phrase “liberal arts,” Brown notes:
Even in classical antiquity, the liberal arts (rooted in liberus, the Latin word for individual freedom) denoted the education appropriate to free men, in contrast to that of slaves. A liberal arts education, in other words, was necessary for free men to know and engage the world sufficiently to exercise that freedom. It was the knowledge that enabled the use of freedom, but that in an important sense also made men free insofar as it lifted them from the immediate present to a longer temporal and larger spatial domain, one accessible only through knowledge. (184)
She then goes on to characterize the midcentury achievement of “extending liberal arts education from the elite to the many” as “nothing short of a radical democratic event, one in which all became potentially eligible for the life of freedom long reserved for the few” (185). Here we might ask whether the attempt to deploy the style of education developed in a highly stratified, slave-owning society for the purposes of democratic equality is coherent or sustainable. Admittedly, as with her very guarded praise of actual existing liberal-democratic states, she is more interested in the aspiration opened up by mass higher education than in its obvious limits. Yet she seems not to recognize that the very structure of this educational program leads much more directly to something like the neoliberal project of creating a more inclusive elite rather than undercutting elitism, an agenda that fits well with the neoliberal trope of equality of opportunity as a substitute for equality of outcome. In other words, there may be a reason that higher education has proven to be ground zero for neoliberalization in most Western countries.
What is more troubling is her one-sided focus on the middle class, as in her lament that “we are no longer governed by the idea that upward mobility and middle-class status require schooling in the liberal arts” (182). This is a puzzling claim, because during the heyday of Fordism, middle-class status emphatically did not necessarily entail a liberal arts education. Americans remember that era as a golden age because the average high school–educated laborer, thanks to strong unions and supportive government policies, could reasonably expect all the comforts and privileges of middle-class life. Middle-class families in that era may have sent their children to college in the expectation of further social mobility, but vocational training—which Brown implicitly treats as a degrading pursuit—was a potential path into a well-remunerated unionized trade, and thereby into the middle class as well. The meritocratic credentialism that makes a college education the baseline condition of a financially stable, comfortable life is a product of the neoliberal era, not a casualty of it.
This distortion in Brown’s view of the Fordist era arguably stems from the real root source of the political-economic binary around which she structures her work: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.15 Published in 1958, a time when the Fordist project was not only a living reality but a relatively new one, Arendt’s account of human nature and its vicissitudes evinces a palpable disdain for the burgeoning mass middle class and its consumer culture. This polemical purpose shapes her idiosyncratic reading of Aristotle, which bifurcates the household and the polis in an exaggerated way and poses the latter as a purely human creation over against the merely “natural” life of the household.16
This bias shows forth more clearly in Arendt’s term for the type of human existence that is focused on the nonproductive labor associated with slaves: animal laborans. Aristotle, by contrast, never reduces the slave to the status of an animal, as shown in a passage where he wonders whether there is a virtue specific to slavery. This is a difficult question insofar as “there is an impasse either way, since, if there are virtues, in what respect do they differ from free people? And if there are not, that would be strange, since they are human beings and have a share in reason.”17 While his answer to the question is certainly unsatisfying from a modern perspective—“it is clear that [the slave] too needs a little virtue, enough that he does not fall short in his tasks on account of dissipation or cowardice”18—his insistence on the humanity of the slave is clear in his conclusion that “people are not speaking beautifully who deprive slaves of reason.”19 We are forced to conclude that in this respect, Arendt is among those who do not speak beautifully.
The same critique could be leveled at her bifurcation of the household from the polis. While Aristotle obviously does distinguish the two, it is not a matter of a binary opposition but of a continuum that leads from the household to the polis. On the very first page of the Politics, Aristotle takes issue with those who claim that the forms of rule present in the household and the city are simply the same, but his purpose is not to claim that the former are foreign or opposed to the latter. If that were the case, why would an account of the household belong in the Politics at all? Rather, the forms of rule found in the household represent the “beginnings” from which the human community grows,20 through the intermediary step of the village as a collection of related households, until it becomes a city when, “so to speak, it gets to the threshold of self-sufficiency, coming into being for the sake of living, but being for the sake of living well.”21 What makes human beings unique is not simply political life but rather speech, which is “for disclosing what is just and what is unjust.” And speech obviously takes place in both the city and the household, making both into sites of moral aspiration: “For this is distinctive of human beings in relation to the other animals, to be alone in having a perception of good and bad, just and unjust, and the rest, and it is an association involving these things that makes a household and a city.”22 The city plays a special role as the most fully developed form of human association in Aristotle’s view, the whole without which the more partial forms of community cannot be fully understood. Yet simply because those forms are not fully developed does not mean that they are not fully human. Adriel Trott puts it well: “Aristotle’s account does not depend on the severe division between an animal life focused on and limited by necessities and a political and free life. Life is always a way of life for Aristotle. Human beings are always already concerned with not just living, but living well.”23
As a reading of Aristotle, then, Arendt’s political-economic binary is reductive and even misleading, more revealing of her own polemical purpose in The Human Condition than of Aristotle’s concepts and goals. Though other influential thinkers embrace a similar distinction (most notably for our purposes, Carl Schmitt), it is Arendt who most explicitly formulated it, and it is Arendt’s authority that most often grounds its use in later works (such as Brown’s). Hence, as I prepare to turn to two other recent works of political theology (or economic theology) that are structured around it, I propose that we designate the view that the political and economic realms are qualitatively distinct in a way that implies a normative hierarchical relationship between the two as “Arendt’s axiom.”
Arendt, Economy, and Theology
One of the greatest political theologians of our day, Giorgio Agamben, indirectly expresses his debt to Hannah Arendt from the very first sentences of Homo Sacer: “The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life.’ They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zōē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the way of living proper to an individual or a group.”24 This distinction has prompted considerable criticism, most notably from Jacques Derrida, who argues that the hard-and-fast division Agamben seems to posit is not supported by the textual evidence.25 Whatever its basis in the ancient Greek corpus, however, its source as a philosophical argument is obvious: Arendt’s Human Condition, where she makes a strikingly similar claim: “The word ‘life,’ however, has an altogether different meaning if it is related to the [distinctively human] world. . . . The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zōē, that Aristotle said that it is ‘somehow a kind of praxis’” (97). Agamben makes this connection explicit when he proclaims his intention to combine Foucault’s theory of biopolitics with Arendt’s analysis in The Human Condition of “the process that brings homo laborans [sic]—and, with it, biological life as such—gradually to occupy the very center of the political scene of modernity.”26 He is referring here to Arendt’s narrative of the gradual eclipse of classical distinction between the political and the economic in favor of what she calls “the social,” a realm in which the two fields collapse. His hope is that, by bringing Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to bear on Arendt’s concepts, he can build a connection between Arendt’s “research in The Human Condition and the penetrating analyses she had previously devoted to totalitarian power (in which a biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking)” and at the same time fill in the lacuna in Foucault’s analysis, which “never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.”27
Broadly speaking, then, though his ambitions are much broader, Agamben’s project is structurally homologous to Brown’s insofar as both attempt to supplement Foucault with Arendt. More than that, though they focus on different destructive regimes (concentration camps and neoliberalism, respectively), both trace their baleful effects to the collapse in the distinction between political and economic life, or in Arendt and Agamben’s terms (if not Aristotle’s), bios and zōē. In Agamben’s analysis this collapse leaves the human being in the condition of homo sacer, the readily victimizable “bare life” that finds its exemplary form in the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. While Brown is not prepared to attribute such a danger directly to the neoliberal program (which for her requires but does not logically entail sacrifice of excess populations; see 216), it is nonetheless the case that the depoliticized neoliberal subject, buffeted endlessly by economic forces, is deprived of any of the political agency or dignity associated with bios.
Agamben pushes the collapse of the zōē/bios distinction much further back than Brown, Foucault, or even Arendt. Arendt presents classical Athens as the exemplary moment when the distinction clearly held and presents a narrative where philosophers and theologians, unable to bear the rigors of authentic political action, begin to replace the vita activa (bios) with the vita contemplativa—setting in train the complex sequence of events that will culminate in the modern notion of the “social” and the triumph of the animal laborans (zōē). By contrast, Agamben argues that the seeds of the distinction’s collapse are already present in the Greek political form itself, because political sovereignty has always already been at work collapsing the zōē/bios distinction by reducing members of the human political community to the status of victimizable “bare life.”
In many ways Agamben’s narrative supplements that of Arendt, giving more attention to the Roman household and its influence on the protototalitarianism of the Imperial era in both Homo Sacer and State of Exception.28 In other ways, however, Agamben reverses Arendt, insofar as his close analysis of book 1 of the Politics in The Use of Bodies represents the figure of the slave—and not, as in both Arendt and Brown, the master—as the most promising model for a new vision of human life.29 This reversal reflects the fact that rather than following Arendt and Brown in reasserting bios over and against the ravages of an out-of-control zōē, the political over the economic, Agamben is aiming at something he calls “form-of-life,” which would not so much restore the political-economic dyad to its classical form as sidestep it altogether. In other words, instead of attempting to get back to the proper balance between the political and economic that a later tradition has betrayed, Agamben views the distinction itself as the root of the later developments and claims that the only way to escape those destructive effects is to escape or surpass the dyad itself.
Yet the inertia of Arendt’s axiom continues to make itself felt in Agamben’s project. Alongside this radical proposal to rework all the most fundamental concepts of the Western intellectual tradition, there is a sense that returning to something like the balance represented in the Greek polis may represent the “least bad” practical option. In these moments Agamben echoes Arendt’s one-sided denigration of the economic realm. In the conclusion of The Sacrament of Language, for instance, Agamben bemoans the collapse of the political into the economic (and the concomitant effects on the political action par excellence for Arendt, namely speech): “In a moment when all the European languages seem condemned to swear in vain and when politics can only assume the form of an oikonomia, that is, of a governance of empty speech over bare life, it is once more from philosophy that there can come, in the sober awareness of the extreme situation at which the living human being that has language has arrived in its history, the indication of a line of resistance and of change.”30 Though Agamben does not call for a return to the political proper, it is clear that the contemporary order’s descent into sheer oikonomia (or economy) and empty political speech is a sign of just how bad things have gotten—a diagnosis that Brown would surely share.
Agamben’s first extended engagement with the concept of oikonomia appears in The Kingdom and the Glory, where he declares his intention to “inquire into the paths by which and the reasons why power in the West has assumed the form of an oikonomia, that is, a government of human beings.”31 At the time this massive work first appeared—as the unexpected second part to the second volume of the Homo Sacer series—this turn toward oikonomia seemed to depart from his more recent work on sovereignty and “bare life.” Indeed, to the naive reader it might even appear that the paradigm of “economic theology” that he introduces alongside “political theology” is intended to be a positive alternative to Schmitt (1). This impression is reinforced when Agamben restages the debate between Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson and argues that for all his harsh criticism of Schmitt, Peterson shares with him the same “conscious repression” of the economic element in the theological texts he is citing (14). Only once we restore the economic to its central role, Agamben claims, can we “identify what is really at stake in the debate between the two friends/enemies about political theology” (14).
The next four chapters of The Kingdom and the Glory unfold a complex genealogy of the concept of oikonomia, beginning from early Greek thought, moving through the New Testament and patristic authors, and ultimately culminating in the articulation of the doctrine of Divine Providence that, Agamben suggests, serves as the model for the contemporary political-economic order. When he lays out a series of theses on the “providential paradigm” (140–41), several of the features adduced appear to be positive from a modern perspective, such as the necessity of “the division of powers” and the claim that providential governance “is not a despotic power that does violence to the freedom of creatures” but instead “presupposes the freedom of those who are governed” (141). We seem, therefore, to be breaking with the terms of Arendt’s axiom, wherein the economic is the realm of necessity and emphatically not the realm of freedom.
Lurking in the background throughout this analysis is another question that Agamben also introduces in his preface: “Why does power need glory? If it is essentially force and capacity for action and government, why does it assume the rigid, cumbersome, and ‘glorious’ form of ceremonies, acclamations, and protocols? What is the relationship between economy and Glory?” (xii). The issue of glory initially seems to be simply juxtaposed to the theme of economy, with no necessary connection between the two, and the first half of the book barely mentions the theme of glory. Not until the sixth chapter, “Angelology and Bureaucracy,” do the two themes appear together, united in the theological figure of the angels, who both execute God’s providential plan on earth and eternally praise God in heaven. The two functions are so closely intertwined, in fact, that Agamben can claim that the “caesura” between praise and governance “cuts through each angel, which is divided between the two poles that are constitutive of the angelic function” (151).
Agamben’s goal in this chapter, however, is to pry the two roles apart. His first step is to observe that there is a key difference between Christian and modern notions of economic governance: “the theological economy is essentially finite. The Christian paradigm of government, like the vision of history that supports it, lasts from the creation until the end of the world. . . . [Modernity] abolishes eschatology and infinitely prolongs the history and government of the world” (163; translation altered). Yet this contrast is not so clear-cut: “The principle according to which the government of the world will cease with the Last Judgment has only one important exception in Christian theology. It is the case of hell” (163). If heaven is filled with angels who, retired from their administrative functions, have nothing to do but praise God, hell is the abode of their fallen comrades, the demons, who can never consciously praise God and yet “will carry out their judicial function as executors of the infernal punishments for all eternity.” This means that “hell is that place in which the divine government of the world survives for all eternity, even if only in a penitentiary form,” and “the demons . . . will be the indefectible ministers and eternal executioners of divine justice” (164). This series of observations culminates in a rare joke: “this means that, from the perspective of Christian theology, the idea of eternal government (which is the paradigm of modern politics) is truly infernal” (164). And with that, Agamben definitively turns away from the paradigm of economy as completely unredeemable, devoting the remainder of his text to an analysis of glory.
This convoluted argument amounts to what Agamben might call a “forcing.” It is internally self-contradictory insofar as the Christian paradigm is presented as including both a finite and an eternal economy. And it is far from clear why the association between economy and hell in Christian theology is sufficient reason to dismiss the paradigm of economy altogether. After all, Christian theology associates economy equally, if not more so, with salvation and even (as Agamben himself shows in The Kingdom and the Glory) with God’s own trinitarian life. In any event, Agamben has given us no grounds to simply accept Christian moral valuations in this regard. His case for the ultimate separability of economy and glory is also shaky, because the eternal coexistence of heaven and hell would seem to support exactly the opposite conclusion, namely that they are inseparable. And finally, there is a strange irony in the fact that Agamben, after starting his investigation with the claim that Schmitt and Peterson went wrong by turning away from the concept of economy, should engage in a “conscious repression” of his own by banishing economy to eternal hellfire.
Thus a study that seemed set to overturn Arendt’s axiom reasserts it in the most hyperbolic possible way. And once we see the connection with Arendt, Agamben’s enigmatic meditations on “inoperativity” appear to be a variation on the theme that the fullest potential of humanity is only to be found beyond the necessity of servile labor. Meanwhile, the relationship between the two paradigms of political theology and economic theology is nowhere clarified. The sharp turn away from economy and toward glory, a theme that Agamben associates with sovereignty despite the fact that he reaches it by way of economic governance, would seem to indicate that the two are somehow separable. Yet not only glory but the political theological theme par excellence, the sovereign exception, can appear as an economic theme, since oikonomia takes on the implication of “exception” in the context of Christian pastoral care (49–50). One could infer from this that the realm of economy is where we can find Benjamin’s exception that has become the norm, but Agamben does not make this connection explicit in this context. Instead, the implication seems to be that, as in Arendt and Brown’s narratives, the economy is illegitimately encroaching on the territory of the political.
What is strange about Agamben’s reassertion of Arendt’s axiom is that his genealogical narrative undermines many of the normative claims that gave the axiom its force. I have already highlighted the fact that in the providential paradigm, the economic is identified as the realm of freedom, not of constraint and necessity—a clear reversal in Arendt’s terms. More broadly, Arendt describes the economic as the realm of the animal laborans caught in the endless cycle of natural reproduction, whereas the political is the ever-shifting terrain of surprise and creativity. By contrast, Agamben identifies the political with the “glorious” tedium of pomp and ceremony, while the principle of oikonomia is adaptability itself: “oikonomia designates a practice and a non-epistemic knowledge that should be assessed only in the context of the aims that they pursue, even if, in themselves, they may appear to be inconsistent with the good” (19). It is telling in this regard that the first conceptual transfer that Agamben documents out of the “proper” realm of the household concerns precisely the field of rhetoric (19–20), which is to say political speech. Though he claims that “the awareness of the original domestic meaning was never lost,” in terms of Agamben’s own analysis it would make just as much sense to claim that oikonomia represents a general logic that was initially discovered in the domestic sphere but of which the household application is only one case among others. Certainly he provides us with no grounds for maintaining a sharp distinction between the economic and the political, much less for privileging the latter—hence, perhaps, the forced and hasty way he demonizes the economic by means of a joke.
Working independently at around the same time Agamben was completing The Kingdom and the Glory, Dotan Leshem developed his own genealogy of the concept of oikonomia, which also starts from an Arendtian perspective and aims to supplement Foucault’s researches into biopolitics and governmentality.32 There are several notable differences in Leshem’s approach—his focus on the period around the Council of Nicea (325 CE) as opposed to Agamben’s preference for the previous era of Christian thought, for instance—but the most decisive is his emphasis on more pastoral texts that reflected how Christian bishops conceived their day-to-day practice in terms of oikonomia. In this respect Leshem’s work functions much more clearly as a supplement to Foucault’s research into late medieval and early modern pastoral practice. Leshem is also more explicit about his debt to Arendt, structuring his investigation around a “human trinity” of the economic, the political, and the philosophical sphere that he derives from The Human Condition.
I have argued elsewhere that Agamben’s genealogy of oikonomia can be read as an indirect critique of neoliberalism,33 but no such deductive work is required in the case of Leshem, who published his findings under the title The Origins of Neoliberalism. As it turns out, however, the book engages only briefly with neoliberalism, and as in Agamben’s parallel study, the direct genealogical connections with modernity can be characterized as more suggestive than definitive. The key justification behind the title is the claim that Leshem has uncovered in “the Christianity of Late Antiquity . . . the transformative moment” in the process by which economy comes to overpower all other aspects of human life (3; italics in original), a process that has culminated in the pan-economism of the neoliberal order.
Leshem’s “human trinity” cannot simply be equated to the dyad of Arendt’s axiom, and he concludes by expressing his hope that the philosophical, rather than the political, can take the lead in overcoming the planetary sway of the economic (179–81). Yet the logic and structure of his argument depend on the identification of the economic with a discrete and definable aspect of human experience, and as in the case of Agamben, his own genealogical narrative undercuts such a claim. Most notably, he agrees with Agamben that the relationship between economy and politics with respect to freedom completely reverses in the Christian dispensation: where in classical Greece “economy begins with necessity,” in Christianity, “economy begins with freedom” (78) while “politics is the kingdom of necessity and suppression” (121). And Leshem’s description of the flexible—and at times even underhanded (29)—conduct of bishops carrying out their economic function of growing God’s kingdom sounds much more like the kind of open-ended, unpredictable action Arendt associates with the political than like anything she would attribute to the humble animal laborans. Leshem’s investigation could almost be read as a critique of Arendt’s axiom, if not for the fact that a version of that axiom provides the basis for his claim to be tracing “the origins of neoliberalism.”
Alternative Approaches
In The Kingdom and the Glory Agamben laments the paucity of scholarship on the role of oikonomia in Christian thought, most of which focuses on individual figures or time periods. Among the works he names is Marie-José Mondzain’s Image, Icon, Economy, which he counts as a narrowly specialized treatment because it “limits itself to analyzing the implications of this concept for the iconoclastic disputes that took place between the eighth and ninth centuries” in the Byzantine Empire (2).34 Leshem also treats the book as a specialized study, arguing briefly with specific points in footnotes (185nn3–5).
In reality, though, Mondzain’s text displays the same ambition and philosophical rigor as Agamben’s and Leshem’s but without the blinders of Arendt’s axiom. Thus, like Agamben, Mondzain is concerned with the relationship between economy and glory (in the sense of spectacle and image), and like Leshem, she is engaged with the political, economic, and philosophical dimensions of human experience. Yet she comes to the material with no prior commitments about what distinctions do or should hold in either case, nor with any pregiven value judgments about the “proper” place of the economic. A scholar and translator of the iconophile Patriarch of Constantinople Nikephorus, she is concerned to let her materials speak to the contemporary world on their own terms, while eschewing the easy answers proffered by more pious scholars.35 She can straightforwardly characterize economy as “a philosophical and political concept”36—at once disregarding Arendt’s axiom and sidestepping Agamben’s claim in The Kingdom and the Glory that “economy” must be identified not as a concept but as a “signature” (4–5). And from this perspective Mondzain is not surprised or disturbed to find that the concept of oikonomia is central in the debate over images, nor does she hesitate to characterize that struggle as one that is at once political (defying the iconoclastic emperor who wishes to hoard the power of images for himself)37 and philosophical (requiring sophisticated argumentation to achieve the apparent reversal of the biblical prohibition of images).
Recounting fully Mondzain’s argument would take us far afield of the present study, but her overall method can serve as a model for the general theory of political theology that I am aiming for. Mondzain shares with political theology the basic refusal of the religious-political dyad, as shown equally in her dismissal of recent edifying studies of the icon’s religious role and in her bold assertion of the contemporary relevance of the theological problem she is studying.38 She moves fluidly among the political, the economic, and the philosophical, without presupposing any normative boundaries between them and without risking reductionism by putting forward any one factor as fundamental. This means that she is as attentive as Foucault to the many and varied weapons that find their way into a power struggle, but at the same time, she also anticipates what I am calling a general political theology by taking seriously the normative claims that motivate the opponents.
At the same time, though, Mondzain does not offer much concrete guidance for an investigation of the neoliberal order. Although Agamben and Leshem may have paid her work insufficient attention, they were not wrong to see in it primarily a specialist work focused on a distant historical period with only a tenuous claim to contemporary relevance. More immediately helpful are a series of treatments of the neoliberal order from a theological perspective—namely, Mark C. Taylor’s Confidence Games, Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money, Joshua Ramey’s Politics of Divination, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh—each of which in its own way shares in Mondzain’s disregard for the arbitrary boundaries that are supposed to separate the political, religious, economic, and philosophical realms. As such, although only Santner’s study explicitly claims the mantle of political theology, each is able to achieve the kind of stunning defamiliarization of our present moment that has always been political theology’s stock in trade.
Taylor’s work is in many ways the most path-breaking. Predating even Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism, which arguably inaugurated the shift in focus from neoconservatism to neoliberalism on the academic left, Taylor provides not only an account of neoliberalism but a complete theory of culture that brings together the theological, the economic, and the aesthetic realms into a coherent whole. He is unique among commentators in humanities disciplines in being relatively optimistic, even enthusiastic, about the neoliberal order. This is doubtless due in part to his experience in founding an educational start-up called the Global Education Network, which gave him the opportunity to act as a “participant-observer” at the intersection of computer technology and high finance39—a much more positive encounter with the neoliberal order than most academics, bogged down in assessment rubrics and scholarly impact evaluations, can boast.
More fundamentally, though, his apparent optimism stems from the fact that Taylor does not seek to impose a normative vision on contemporary reality, an effort that he associates with the failed command economies of the Eastern Bloc,40 but instead starts from the recognition that “we are entering a new territory and need new maps.”41 In this regard he believes that neoliberal economists and financiers alike have been just as guilty as the Soviets of clinging to an outdated model—namely, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which wrongly presupposes that markets have a tendency to return to equilibrium. Hence Taylor attempts to be more neoliberal than the neoliberals themselves, developing a new conceptual model, drawn from complex systems theory, that can better respond to the new challenges presented by an increasingly networked world. From a certain perspective, then, Taylor is taking the bold step of putting himself forward as a theologian of neoliberalism, or perhaps its prophet, warning the entrepreneurs and financiers of the world to flee the coming crisis by discarding the old wineskins of their outdated economic models in favor of a new theory of culture that truly answers to the demands of the present.
Goodchild is a theologian of the neoliberal order in a different sense. Rather than attempt to devise a normative theology for neoliberalism, Goodchild wishes to discern the theology that is already implicit in the practice of capitalism itself. His investigation is perhaps the most explicit example of the broader approach to “theology” that I am associating with a general political theology. Goodchild is not saying that contemporary capitalist practice is metaphorically “like” theology, nor is he claiming (with Taylor, Agamben, and Leshem) that economic theory has “roots” in theology. He is saying that capitalism directly implies its own theology, centered on money as the Tillichian “ultimate concern.” In a world where money is effectively God, Goodchild asks, what theology is implied? While he draws extensively on economic theory, Goodchild is much more concerned with the history and practice of finance. Particularly illuminating is his presentation of setting a price as an “act of faith,” based not on objective facts but on “hopes and expectations, uncertainties and strategies.” This means that “each act of pricing is a guess, an estimate or approximation. Since there is nothing to which it approximates, then pricing is always an act of faith. It is inherently theological.”42 From that perspective, financial accounting is less an objective science than an ascetic discipline, a series of rituals that a firm must carry out to show that it is a faithful steward of its resources.43
Ramey also associates neoliberal practice with the realm of ritual, and, uniquely among theologically informed critics of neoliberalism, it is not Christian ritual that he has in mind. Instead, he claims that “neoliberal market fundamentalism—the view that markets alone can resolve the problem of how to construct social life in the face of unforeseeable contingencies—is a perverse and disavowed colonization of archaic divination rites, the rituals through which human cultures, on the basis of chance, have perennially sought for more-than-human knowledge.”44 Although he does not propose a full-blown theory of religion, Ramey identifies “tacit or explicit evaluations of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans that the unknown and unforeseeable represent” as calling forth different forms of piety in different historical periods. The problem is not that neoliberalism is a form of divination or piety toward the contingent—Ramey is not a secularist deploying “primitive religion” polemically to delegitimate neoliberalism—but that it does not recognize itself as such, meaning that it “has managed to render its own politics of divination incontestable.”45
In the previous chapter, I defined the root of political theology as the need to respond to the deadlock represented by the problem of evil and the problem of legitimacy. Ramey’s “archaic and perennial problem of how to meaningfully interpret the deliverances of chance” could be interpreted as another articulation of that same deadlock.46 What is the problem of evil and suffering but the problem of how to cope with what we cannot, by definition, predict or control? And what presents a greater challenge to a political order than its failure to anticipate or compensate for an unforeseen disaster? In this sense Ramey’s project, though it is not explicitly situated in terms of political theology,47 is broadly homologous to my own. He also provides resources for the present chapter’s concern to break down the political-economic binary by highlighting the deeply political character of market competition, as when he points out that “the conversion of all sociality into market-like processes has introduced dispute and judgment everywhere,”48 making the economic realm the center of the kind of agonistic competition that Arendt associates with the political. And in his reading of Vico’s account of the place of divination in the class struggles that defined primitive Roman society,49 he makes it clear that what is at stake in the competition over the right to divination is prestige and honor—in a word, glory.
We are thus back where Agamben began: the connection between economy and glory. It is this connection that is not so much interrogated as presupposed in one of the only existing studies to explicitly take up political theology as a primary lens for understanding the neoliberal predicament, namely, Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh. In his previous book, The Royal Remains, Santner had advanced a synthesis of psychoanalysis and political theology in order to construct a narrative of the transition to modernity wherein the “stuff” of the king’s sovereign body was dispersed into the bodies of the people.50 Here he argues that the “spectral materiality” of sovereignty was subsequently displaced into the surplus value congealed in the commodity. This leads Santner to risk a bold reading of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism as a theory of glory, a reading that he connects with Weber’s well-known narrative of the “spirit” of capitalism that demands that we “never cease to economize, and all for the greater glory of God.” In other words, “the Protestant Ethic effectively transforms work itself into a sort of obsessive-compulsive doxology, the liturgical praise or glorification of God,” a ritual observance that contemporary capitalism unwittingly continues.51
All four of these studies provide models for the project of a political theology of neoliberalism. All four insist on the theological character of the neoliberal order, from both a genealogical and a synchronic perspective. They also display the kind of disciplinary promiscuity that marks political theology, even in its narrowly Schmittian form. Ramey and Santner, in particular, implicitly overcome Arendt’s axiom when they show how political features (competition and struggle, glory and ceremonial) come to define the supposedly purely economic realm of neoliberalism. Yet both are still working within the terms of a qualitative distinction between the political and the economic. For Ramey, the political aspects represent the unintentional blowback of neoliberalism’s attempt to extinguish the political, while for Santner, the political/glorious side of neoliberalism represents a kind of uncanny leftover of the more properly political phenomenon of pre-Revolutionary monarchical sovereignty. In both cases we are once again dealing with the ostensibly surprising revelation that what “should” be a solely economic phenomenon also displays political features.
Beyond Arendt’s Axiom
My question at this point is why, even when it does not appear as a betrayal or fall from grace, this intermingling of the political and the economic should come as a surprise. Literally every single genealogical narrative we have investigated so far—including, above all, those that are most invested in Arendt’s axiom—has shown that the Athenian model lionized by Arendt is the exception, not the norm. Virtually every feature of human experience that is supposed to be properly political in Arendtian terms has appeared in the economic realm in later eras. What possible basis is there for clinging to the Arendtian distinction as a norm or even as a foil?
One might be tempted to reply that neoliberalism presents itself as the economic overcoming of politics. And it is true that neoliberalism puts forward such a face, which is itself an interesting fact that I will attempt to account for in the next chapter. Yet it does not take much critical acumen to see through the vulgar libertarianism with which neoliberal ideologues seek to veil a regime in which state action is absolutely pervasive. To believe that a violation of simplistic libertarianism represents a contradiction or an unintended consequence is ultimately an all-too-sophisticated way of falling for neoliberalism’s ideological framing by taking it more seriously than it deserves or even intends to be taken.
A political theological approach does incorporate the normative claims that underwrite a given paradigm, but that means putting aside opportunistic sales pitches aimed at a mass audience and paying closer attention to what the most intellectually rigorous proponents of that paradigm say to each other. We have already discussed one good example of the latter: Milton Friedman’s “Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects.” In that speech Friedman describes neoliberalism as a political agenda to install a certain economic order that reflects a set of normative principles about how human society is and ought to be structured. If we take Friedman at his word that this is the kind of thing neoliberalism is or at least wants to be, then Arendt’s axiom would provide us with strong grounds to lament neoliberalism’s perversion of the true meaning of politics and perhaps even to inscribe neoliberalism into a longer narrative of decline and betrayal. Yet that axiom would provide us with very little analytic purchase on neoliberalism in its historical specificity, much less any guidance for how to transform or overcome it.
This is not to say that concepts of the political and the economic have no meaning or value. Without those categories it would be very difficult to talk about neoliberalism at all. They are closely intertwined and lack a definitive boundary, but that does not mean that distinctions between them cannot be analytically helpful. Nor should my argument be taken to mean that the genealogical study of the concept of oikonomia is a blind alley. Agamben, Leshem, and Mondzain have all contributed substantially to our knowledge of economic phenomena, opening up a productive path of research that other scholars continue to build on.
What I am suggesting is that their adherence to Arendt’s axiom has rendered Agamben’s and Leshem’s accounts insufficiently genealogical. And here I have in mind Nietzsche’s methodological credo from The Genealogy of Morals, where he declares that “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it.” This implies that “the entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.”52
For a truly genealogical genealogy of economy, the kinds of displacements and reversals we have seen would represent neither a surprise nor a betrayal but a baseline expectation. Granting that the Greeks have bequeathed to the Western tradition a certain tension between the political and the economic, a genealogical investigation would not lament but positively expect that the relationship between the two would be continually reconfigured—sometimes to the point of near-unrecognizability—in the ongoing power struggle that is history. And that would mean recognizing that “the political” and “the economic” are not and cannot be static unities. Instead, the distinction itself can be viewed as an apparatus for distributing power and authority by means of the distribution of other important binaries: freedom vs. necessity, artifice vs. nature, deliberation vs. spontaneity, equality vs. hierarchy, or contestation vs. harmony.
In the original Aristotelian model, the binaries as listed here are all made to reflect the overarching binary of political vs. economic so that, for instance, the organization of the household is what happens spontaneously and naturally while the city requires a higher degree of deliberate construction. Where the political for Aristotle is the place for equality and contestation, the household, by contrast, displays a harmonious hierarchical order. None of these distinctions is absolute or exclusive—for instance, the city is also “natural” in the sense of being the goal toward which human associations do or should tend—but they underwrite a harmonious social order in which every important aspect of human experience is represented and the highest human aspirations find space and support.
Yet even on its own terms, Aristotle’s idyllic polis is menaced from within by a binary that emerges from the household itself: the distinction between legitimate household management (oikonomia) and out-of-control acquisition by means of money and market exchange (chrēmatistikē, which Joe Sachs translates as “provisioning”). Whereas the former is bounded by the goal of “living well,” the latter is completely “unlimited” and hence unnatural.53 Though it cannot be eliminated entirely, the drive for acquisition must not be allowed free rein, lest it completely displace the pursuit of “living well.”
It was on the basis of this distinction that one of the greatest theorists of the Fordist order, Karl Polanyi, declared Aristotle’s Politics “certainly still the best analysis of the subject we possess” because it acknowledges the dangers associated with markets, and particularly with money, but nevertheless recognizes that “as long as markets and money were mere accessories to an otherwise self-sufficient household, the principle of production for use could operate.”54 In other words, Polanyi views Aristotle as an early exponent of his own project of preserving what he calls “society” from the corrosive effects of market forces. Much the same could be said of Arendt, for whom Aristotle represents a critic of mass consumer society avant la lettre.
While one could accuse Arendt or Polanyi of misreading Aristotle on a detailed level, there is nonetheless something appropriate about their gesture. A genealogical perspective invites us to recognize that just as they attempt to borrow Aristotle’s cultural authority to advance their political agendas, so also was Aristotle himself intervening politically in a cultural context where increased reliance on foreign trade and greater emphasis on monetary wealth threatened to undermine traditional social hierarchies and institutions. Aristotle’s text, in other words, does not so much reflect or discover a norm as attempt to impose one on a changing world. And at least in his distinction between legitimate household management and out-of-control acquisition, he was more successful than he ever could have imagined, as his authority backed up a millennium and more of usury bans and trade restrictions in the Christian and Islamic worlds alike. If that authority no longer functions as an effective weapon in the neoliberal order, it is because the advocates of out-of-control acquisition have recruited the forces of family and morality to their side. It is to that disturbing development that we now turn.