AFTER NEOLIBERALISM
My goal in this book has been not only to offer an analysis of neoliberalism, but to think through the ways that political theology would have to change in order to be equal to the task of such an analysis. While conceding that neoliberalism would not count as a paradigm of political theology in strict Schmittian terms, I argued in the first chapter that we can see in Schmitt’s own work a broader vision of political theology, of which the standard Schmittian model would be only a narrow subset. This general theory of political theology would be defined not by particular classic themes—such as the homology between divine and human sovereignty and the problem of the transition from medieval Christianity to secular modernity—but as an inquiry into the ways that human communities try to justify their structures of governance (the political problem of legitimacy) and make sense of their experience of suffering and injustice (the theological problem of evil).
With this expanded notion of political theology in mind, I went on to challenge the conventional understanding of its constituent terms. In my second chapter I argued that the “political” in political theology cannot be understood in terms of “Arendt’s axiom,” according to which there is (or at least should be) an absolute qualitative distinction between the political and the economic. And in the following chapter I made the case that the most salient theological theme for understanding neoliberalism is not divine sovereignty but creaturely free will—reflecting my view that the “theology” in political theology cannot be understood solely as a discourse about God. Finally, I characterized neoliberalism’s strategy of self-legitimation as an apocalyptic one and interpreted the contemporary right-wing reaction as a heretical variation on neoliberalism rather than a comprehensive break with it, insofar as the right-wing reaction still embraces the neoliberal conception of the sources of legitimacy.
Now, as I turn to the question of what might make for a genuine alternative to neoliberalism, my first step will be to consolidate my general theory of political theology by way of a definition: Political theology is a holistic, genealogical inquiry into the structures and sources of legitimacy in a particular historical moment. Political theology in this sense is political because it investigates institutions and practices of governance (whether they are defined as state-based or economic, public or private), and it is theological because it deals with questions of meaning and value (regardless of the form the answers take). And it is both simultaneously because the structures of governance are always necessarily caught up with questions of meaning and value and because the answers we offer to questions of meaning and value always have direct implications for how the world should be governed—in other words, the structures and sources of legitimacy tend to correlate conceptually. It is holistic in the sense that it tends toward a total account of the structures of legitimacy, both institutional and discursive, in a given time and place, and it is genealogical in that it sees those structures not as static givens or abstract doctrines, but as a result of strategy and struggle. That it is both at once means that its holism does not lead to something like a “systematic political theology” but instead serves as a heuristic device for uncovering sites of breakdown and contradiction within any given political theological paradigm. And it is assured of finding such sites because every political theological paradigm represents a contingent strategic outcome within a particular historical moment—never a universal or final answer, because both the problem of legitimacy and the problem of evil are ultimately insoluble.
That political theology seeks after sites of breakdown and contradiction does not mean that it is always on the lookout for superficial hypocrisy, such as a difference between ideological proclamations and concrete practice. Take, for example, the frequent observation among critics of neoliberalism that neoliberals say they want to let the free market work, but actually they rely on the state—an accusation that appears to be well-nigh irresistible, even for critics who are well aware of the central role of the state in constructing the neoliberal order. This attack is highly suspect from a political theological perspective because it takes for granted the neoliberal distinction between state and market.
Against such an acceptance of the neoliberal terms of debate, I have argued from the beginning that one of the distinctive traits of political theology is its refusal of seemingly commonsense binaries. This commitment is announced in its very name, which breaks down secular modernity’s division between the political and the religious, and I argued in the second chapter that it should be just as critical of the dyad of the political and the economic. One benefit of this broad vision of political theology is that it would allow for a broader view of the core texts of the discipline. Indeed, one of the most curious aspects of political theology as presently understood is that Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is not considered a foundational document alongside Schmitt’s and Kantorowicz’s work.1 What ultimately motivates this breaking down of the political-economic binary, however, is not simply a desire to expand the purview of political theology, but rather a recognition that political theological paradigms legitimate themselves precisely by means of the core conceptual distinctions they set up.
In the case of neoliberalism, the distinction between state and market—which has functioned in different ways at different moments in the history of modern capitalism—is articulated in such a way as to reinforce neoliberal hegemony by forestalling the emergence of power centers guided by non-neoliberal priorities. Libertarian clichés play into this process by simultaneously naturalizing the market and painting the state as an incompetent blunderer at best and a protototalitarian oppressor at worst. Within this framework, any autonomous action on the part of the state, uninformed by the economic imperatives formulated by neoliberal technocrats, is illegitimate. And the irresistible hypocrisy attack ironically echoes this logic, insofar as it presents state action as something shameful that must be hidden.
Political theology cannot accept any static, normative distinction between the political and the economic because it recognizes that every political theological paradigm represents a transformation and redistribution of authoritative categories. This means that political theology is always necessarily concerned with change, because each order arises out of the ruins of its predecessors and each order is threatened with dissolution in its turn. We cannot understand neoliberalism except in the context of the decline in Fordism, just as we cannot understand Fordism apart from the world-historical crises that arose from the breakdown of the “hundred years’ peace” of classical liberalism. At the same time, political theology is not a teleological discipline. Political theological paradigms do not emerge from some inner necessity of the historical process but through conflict and creativity.
In our specific context, this means that neoliberalism was not the only possible response to the crisis of Fordism in the early 1970s. As Melinda Cooper reminds us, there were many possibilities in play at that historical moment, many of which seem almost inconceivably radical from our present perspective. The victory of neoliberalism was a contingent outcome that depended in part on the skillful manipulation of the resentments and anxieties that arose out of the contradictions within the Fordist paradigm. Things really could have turned out differently, and we would be living in a very different world if they had—possibly even a world in which neoliberal policy prescriptions, far from being the only “realistic” option, would appear laughably foolish.
This is not to say that political theology represents a sheer voluntarism, but its emphasis on human agency makes it a valuable counterweight to the determinism and claustrophobia that often characterize the Marxist and Foucauldian approaches that have so far dominated the analysis of neoliberalism. To paraphrase Marx, political theology in the broadest sense teaches that human beings create their structures of meaning and legitimacy, but not in conditions of their own choosing. This emphasis on contingency and human agency is particularly important to keep in mind in our present moment, when so many commentators, both mainstream and academic, are tempted to declare the right-wing reaction to be the inevitable outcome of neoliberalism.
As I tried to show in the previous chapter, the right-wing reaction is indeed legible as one possible outcome of the neoliberal frame, one that pushes certain core convictions to their logical extreme. Yet from a political theological perspective, it is neither a genuine alternative to neoliberalism nor a particularly robust variation on the theme. For political theology as for classical democratic theory, political power relies on the consent of the governed—no structure of legitimacy and meaning can long survive if the people it is supposed to govern do not believe in it. As Bonnie Honig points out, even Carl Schmitt’s “neo-Hobbesian” political theory “has democratic qualities: It postulates popular subscription to sovereign power.”2 And in contrast to both combative and normative neoliberalism, punitive neoliberalism and the right-wing reaction that evolves out of it are profoundly lacking in popular support and seem to have no interest in democratic legitimacy.
The right-wing reactionaries may yet be able to cling to power through institutional quirks or outright violence. They will do great damage if they succeed in doing so, at great human cost. Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that they are, on the most fundamental level, weak. Even leaving aside the implausibility of their political agenda, which is based on a heady mixture of magical thinking and conspiracy theories, their lack of popular legitimacy means that they simply do not represent a viable long-term alternative to the neoliberal paradigm. In fact, as demonstrated by the outcome of the recent French election, they may have given neoliberalism a new lease on life, with the shambles of Trump and Brexit serving as cautionary tales. If there is to be a right-wing alternative to neoliberalism, it will have to take a very different form, led by very different people.
Prospects for a Return to Fordism
The same two countries that have provided the most vivid illustrations of the right-wing reaction have also witnessed the emergence of two leaders who promise to break with the neoliberal consensus from the left: Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom. Though neither has taken power at the time of this writing, both are enjoying surging popularity—particularly among the younger generation—in an environment where their neoliberal centrist colleagues seem utterly incapable of capturing the public imagination. Both are veterans of the political struggles of the 1960s, and hence they represent a kind of pre-neoliberal remnant within their respective parties (treating Sanders as a de facto Democrat despite his official status as an Independent). Both are witnesses to an era when any number of policies that are dubbed impossible today (more generous welfare and health provision, for example, or fully state-funded higher education) were living realities, and though their movements have also attracted more radical elements, both Sanders and Corbyn are essentially promising a return to some version of the Fordist welfare state.
Such an outcome would be far preferable, in my view, to either the normative neoliberal status quo ante or the right-wing reaction’s cruel parody of punitive neoliberalism. And I would postulate that such an outcome is possible in principle: the material resources necessary to achieve it clearly exist, and although the political obstacles are considerable, it would be shortsighted to assume that political conditions cannot change, especially at a time when we are witnessing so many unexpected events. That being said, however, here as in the previous chapter, I do not aspire to prognostication or punditry. My task is to assess the prospects for a return to Fordism on the level of political theology. What are its prospects for effecting the profound conceptual and moral changes needed to create a genuine new paradigm to replace neoliberalism? More than that, can we reasonably expect a renewed Fordism to represent a robust and durable alternative to neoliberalism?
On both fronts there are grounds for ambivalence, if not pessimism. First and foremost, the original Fordist settlement arose under vastly different circumstances. All the major Western countries had mobilized for total war, and most had witnessed untold destruction. In the latter countries it made sense for the state to take the lead in repairing the damage, while in the United States, which had escaped virtually unscathed, the shift from the Second World War to the Cold War meant that the state maintained a heavy hand in economic development for military reasons. These circumstances contributed to the legitimacy of the Fordist paradigm, as private industry and the general public not only accepted but expected state support and leadership on economic matters.
Both material conditions and the political consensus are radically different today. For a generation and more, state institutions have essentially “outsourced” industrial policy to the financial sector and the neoliberal technocrats who serve their priorities. A more assertive, autonomous role for the state in directing investment and development has become unthinkable. Even in the emergency circumstances of the Global Financial Crisis, direct state ownership or management of financial firms—where state and capital have been most tightly intertwined throughout the neoliberal era—was never seriously considered as an option. The bailouts of the US auto industry featured a larger role for the state in brokering the deal, but here again, the goal was to get things “back to normal,” not to assert a greater independent role for the state in guiding industry, much less owning and operating firms.
Similarly, the experience of wartime rationing and mass conscription in the United States made it much easier to justify an aggressive tax policy and great generosity to the working and middle classes—after all, they had sacrificed a great deal. Meanwhile, greater controls over capital movement and a broad consensus in favor of higher taxes among developed nations made it harder for the wealthy to flee taxation. Neoliberalism has broken down the kind of social solidarity enjoyed in the immediate postwar era, and now countries compete to lower their tax rates to attract wealthy investors. Recognition of this latter challenge has led many proponents of a return to Fordism to find unexpected common ground with the right-wing reaction in proposing trade restrictions, with Sanders going so far as to say that he would happily work with Trump on that issue.3 Yet the act of restricting foreign imports will not in itself cause domestic replacements to arise and could hurt existing domestic producers who rely on global supply chains. Free trade promised that cheap consumer goods would make up for American losses in wages and job security, and trade restrictions could take away the former without restoring the latter. The idea of seizing control of the nation’s economic destiny holds real popular appeal across the political spectrum, but it risks being an empty gesture with adverse economic consequences, undermining the legitimacy of a Fordist-style program going forward.
Even leaving aside the issue of trade, under a neo-Keynesian regime government spending would still be pumped into an economic system wired for neoliberalism. Obama’s stimulus measure was a case in point. Though the stimulus arguably saved the United States from the deeper recession experienced in Europe, it did so at the price of expanding inequality even further relative to precrisis levels. This is because, while it was Keynesian to the extent that it started from the assumption that state spending could boost economic growth, it was operating within a neoliberal economic system—meaning that the very wealthy were in line to receive the lion’s share of the benefits of that growth. One could anticipate perverse outcomes of other Fordist-style policies proposed by Sanders. Universal health care, for instance, could reduce resistance to the so-called gig economy by ameliorating one of the most serious consequences of unstable employment, namely uncertainty of access to health insurance. Free college tuition could also accelerate the process whereby a college degree, far from being a guaranteed path to class mobility, is increasingly a baseline expectation for any entry-level job. I would still support both policies, but they would not represent the kind of paradigm shift that the anti-neoliberal left is calling for.
I bring up these obstacles not to join the chorus of neoliberals proclaiming any return to Fordism impossible but to suggest the inadequacy of the framework within which such changes are typically advocated. That framework is a broadly Polanyian one in which the state (as representative of society) needs to push back against the excesses of the economy. On a superficial level it could appear to be the most radical possible reversal of neoliberalism’s privileging of the economy over the state. Yet it strangely respects the division of labor established by neoliberal ideology, in which the economy maintains its autonomy and the state takes post hoc, indirect actions such as getting foreign competition out of the way, taxing away excessive incomes, or providing funding to give people access to the necessities of life. Again, such an agenda would doubtless be beneficial in many ways, but it would fail to match the ambition of neoliberal practice, which did not simply remove state interference from the economy, but transformed the state in order to enable it to support and cultivate new market forms.
Hence, though there are doubtless many beneficial reforms that could arise from such a framework, simply reversing neoliberalism’s privileging of economy over state does not represent a paradigmatic shift. In fact, it risks simply deploying the neoliberal state over against a neoliberal economy, both of which were designed from the ground up to undo Fordism and render a return to it impossible. One cannot expect to rebuild Fordism using the instruments of its demolition—and among those instruments is the very division of labor between state and economy that shapes our contemporary common sense.
In terms of the question of durability, any attempt to reestablish something like the Fordist model would have to come to terms with that model’s demise. In the previous chapter I remarked that neoliberalism appears to be in the process of failing to reproduce itself for the next generation. Essentially the same thing happened with Fordism. In fact, if we define Fordism as beginning at the end of the Second World War, then it proved even less durable, lasting approximately thirty years as compared to neoliberalism’s forty or so (and counting). Doubtless, a major factor in its decline was the onset of an economic crisis caused by factors both exogenous (the oil crisis) and endogenous (the need to absorb the baby-boomer generation into the workforce), but neoliberalism has endured multiple crises of comparable magnitude. And though the shift to neoliberalism may appear all but inevitable in retrospect, there were also very plausible proposals to save the Fordist system by expanding the welfare apparatus rather than dismantling it.
There was, again, no historical necessity dictating that Fordism be replaced by neoliberalism. Yet just as the emergence of the right-wing reaction, while equally contingent, nonetheless gives us insight into the weaknesses and internal contradictions of neoliberalism, so too does the emergence of neoliberalism shed light on the vulnerabilities of Fordism. Peter Frase has recently articulated one major weakness of the Fordist system in terms of a Marxist critique of Polanyi.4 From Polanyi’s perspective, “Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society. It is the solution natural to industrial workers who see no reason why production should not be regulated directly and why markets should be more than a useful but subordinate trait in a free society.”5 In other words, in the long run the conflict between state (as representative of society) and market will settle into a steady equilibrium where social needs take the lead over market imperatives. Coming from a Marxist perspective, Frase asks, “Is that a stable equilibrium, acceptable to both capitalists and workers? Or is it an inherently unstable situation, one which must break toward either the expropriation of the capitalist class, or the restoration of ruling-class power?” The answer, he believes, is the latter. Though there is a convincing case to be made that “putting unemployed workers back to work would be good for capitalists too, in the sense that it would lead to faster growth and more profits,” such purely economic arguments miss the point that the relationship between boss and worker is not solely economic but political—it is not just about making money, but about power and control.
Here Frase is drawing on the predictions of Michal Kalecki—who published his classic essay “Political Aspects of Full Employment” in 1943,6 the year before The Great Transformation and The Road to Serfdom appeared—that any reform movement to strengthen the hand of workers within the capitalist system will eventually create a dynamic that, in Frase’s words, “calls into question not just profits, but the underlying property relations of capitalism itself.” That prediction came true throughout the Western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which witnessed a proliferation of strike actions and the emergence of demands to vastly expand the welfare state. Perhaps most radical, from a Marxist perspective, was the proposal to institute a universal basic income, which would break with the basic premise of the capitalist system by decoupling income from labor for the entire population rather than for the capitalist class alone. Once this critical moment, which Frase calls the “Kalecki point,” is reached, “employers become willing to take drastic action to get workers back into line, even at the expense of short-term profitability,” including “a ‘capital strike’ in which money is moved overseas or simply left in the bank, as a way of breaking the power of the working class.”
To put this argument in the political theological terms of the previous chapter, the Fordist welfare state could be conceived as a restrainer or katechon, holding back the depredations of the market—an analogy that is all the more fitting in that Polanyi so frequently figures the market in demonic terms. The irony, though, is that the very means by which Fordist policy makers believed they were permanently containing the dangers of unrestrained capitalism actually guaranteed that a decisive crisis would emerge, a crisis that the Polanyian framework rendered all but unthinkable.
And here we come to another irony of the emergence of neoliberalism. In the United States, at least, Fordism was dismantled with the enthusiastic complicity of the very population that most benefited from it: white working- and middle-class homeowners, the so-called Reagan Democrats. As we saw in the previous chapter, Cooper has shown how emergent neoliberalism was able to mobilize anxieties and resentments relating to gender relations, sexual practice, and racial hierarchy in order to recruit such privileged populations into the neoliberal tax revolt. The very “household” norms that had once served to shore up the legitimacy of the welfare state were now turned against it, as the populations who had historically been excluded from its protections were perversely identified as its sole beneficiaries. Here again, we see a weak spot in the Polanyian framework, within which these “household” factors would be grouped on the side of society as opposed to economy. Drawing on Federici, however, my analysis has shown that the gendered division of labor, the disciplining of sexuality, and the enforcement of racial hierarchy have been intrinsic to the capitalist system from the very beginning—meaning that the Fordist project was paradoxically attempting to use the favored tools of capitalism in order to restrain capitalism.
Overall, then, the order that presented itself as restraining and controlling capitalism was actually deeply dependent on it. This is true at the most basic political theological level, since Fordism staked its legitimacy on continuous economic growth. That doubtless seemed a safe bet in the immediate postwar decades, but it took only one protracted economic crisis—one that was, by contemporary standards, relatively mild—to call the legitimacy of the entire system into question. Once the promise of endless prosperity appeared to be broken, conditions were ripe for neoliberals, in alliance with neoconservatives, to portray the welfare state as a parasitic institution that supported social parasites, legitimating their effort to dismantle welfare programs and transform them from a safety net into a disciplinary apparatus.
And the worst part was that these accusations were not entirely false. The social democratic institutions of the Fordist era really were parasitical on capitalist production, in that they used the state’s power of taxation to take a substantial share of capitalist profits and redistribute them. Those redistribution projects themselves depended on capitalist production, because the money they provided was only helpful in that it allowed people to purchase goods and services in the capitalist marketplace. The Fordist system was thus in the awkward position of abrogating capitalist property rights—above all in the punitive tax rates for higher income levels—while still depending on the capitalist system’s continued operation. Though I view such measures as justified and desirable, they were intrinsically vulnerable to attacks on their legitimacy, particularly because gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies opened up the possibility that the bulk of the population could be induced to identify with the property owners whose wealth was being expropriated rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.
The core vulnerability of Fordism was that for all its regulation of and intervention into the economy, it did not take the step of fully transforming the economy—either in the contemporary sense of the mode of production or in the more ancient sense of the organization of the household. From this perspective, Hardt and Negri have argued that neoliberalism and social democracy share the same defect. The neoliberal regime can do nothing but extract wealth, and social democracy, even with its very different ends, does the same: neither can “fulfill . . . the task of promoting, managing, and regulating production.”7 Both merely siphon off value, whether for investment capital or social services, but neither takes responsibility for directly producing value.
More than Sanders, Corbyn pushes in this direction when he advocates renationalizing industries (such as the railways) that were privatized under neoliberalism. And in this Corbyn represents an older tradition on the Labour left that called for state ownership and management of firms and even entire industries, a tradition that has its counterparts throughout Western Europe. While neoliberal dogma presents such regimes as inherently inefficient and oppressive, they were in fact compatible with higher sustained economic growth and more broadly shared increases in standards of living than we have seen in the neoliberal era. Even in the Soviet bloc, for all the mounting problems with the central planning model, what brought about the regime’s demise was not an economic collapse but the decision on the part of the country’s own political elites to dissolve the Union and convert to a capitalist system. And when the post-Soviet leadership submitted to the economic “shock therapy” recommended by Western advisers, the result was an immediate, and thus far permanent, decline in living standards for the vast majority of the population, accompanied by an explosion of wealth for a small elite.
In short, the world has already witnessed functional regimes that combined varying degrees of consciously planned economic production, guided by varying levels of democratic accountability. Not all such regimes are equally appealing as models for contemporary economic transformation, but all point toward the possibility of taking back control from the invisible hand. The experience of the neoliberal era shows us, even if only negatively, that this form of control is the most important of all—far more than the illusory goal of taking back control over our national destiny, for example.
A break with the invisible hand would represent a return to the aspirations of the modern world that are most promising, aspirations that were perhaps best recognized, ironically enough, by a Christian theologian. Writing in 1944 from his jail cell in Tegel—where he was imprisoned for his role in a failed assassination attempt against Hitler and where he would be summarily executed by the Nazis just prior to the Allied victory—Dietrich Bonhoeffer embarked on a series of increasingly radical reflections on the place of Christianity in the modern world.8 These fragments have proven durably influential and controversial in postwar theological debates, due in part to Bonhoeffer’s fate as a kind of modern martyr, but in this context, what is most relevant is his interpretation of modernity. In his letter of June 8, 1944, to his friend and acolyte Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer writes:
The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I’m not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learned to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the “working hypothesis” called “God.” (325)
Christian polemics against this development have proven fruitless, because they refuse to recognize how much things have changed:
The world that has become conscious of itself and the laws that govern its own existence has grown self-confident in what seems to us to be an uncanny way. False developments and failures do not make the world doubt the necessity of the course that it is taking, or of its development; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. (326)
That such a seemingly optimistic reflection on the modern world should be written in a Nazi prison may seem ironic, but as a Christian theologian (indeed, from many perspectives a very conservative one), Bonhoeffer is well aware that human autonomy does not necessarily produce positive results. His main goal, however, is not to castigate the modern world for its sins—not even for the sins that drove him to break with his pacifist principles in a desperate attempt to stop them—but to encourage Christians to embrace the new reality of a “world come of age” rather than fighting a losing battle to return to a world that could not live without God.
Against Christians who react with horror to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God,” then, Bonhoeffer is asking Christians to find a way to live in a world where God really is dead. And had he lived to see it, he would surely view it as deeply ironic that the modern world would construct its own replacement god. For that is ultimately what happened, as neoliberal technocrats set about the hard work of constructing and maintaining the market mechanism, essentially resurrecting an artificial invisible hand that they passed off as an unquestionable, quasi-divine authority.
If Bonhoeffer was right to detect in modern history “one great development that leads to the world’s autonomy” (359), then the victory-by-default of neoliberalism in the early 1990s really did represent the end of history. It was the end of any notion that human beings should or could create their own destiny, the end of any notion of collective deliberation and decision making on ultimate questions. Liberal democracy under neoliberalism represents a forced choice between two fundamentally similar options, betraying its promise to provide a mechanism for rational and self-reflective human agency. The market similarly mobilizes free choice only to subdue and subvert it, “responsibilizing” every individual for the outcomes of the system while radically foreclosing any form of collective responsibility for the shape of society. And any attempt to exercise human judgment and free choice over social institutions and outcomes is rejected as a step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. To choose in any strong sense is always necessarily to choose wrongly, to fall into sin.
Yet this end of history, this evacuation of freedom, was in the last analysis collectively chosen, if only passively. This means that—contrary to Wendy Brown’s vision of a world in which democratic aspirations would be extinguished for good—the option of rejecting the hollow neoliberal vision of human freedom has always been on the table. Our present political moment is the beginning of a struggle to withdraw consent from the neoliberal order by developing a new and more meaningful conception of freedom. This initial gesture of refusal is an absolutely necessary first step, clearing the space to imagine something new. More work is needed, however, because at this early stage, the alternative conceptions of freedom can be characterized more by what they reject than by what they promote. Both demand freedom from neoliberalism (construed in different ways), but neither is quite clear on what they want freedom for.
For the right, freedom means freedom from foreign interference, which ultimately means freedom from the global economic forces that infringe on national sovereignty. Such a conception of freedom clearly holds popular appeal. Yet it is hobbled, not only by its addiction to nostalgia and magical thinking, but even more so by its lack of any positive goal. When these movements do seize power and assert their precious freedom, it is revealed to be an empty gesture of defiance with no program of its own. What is the point of Brexit, for instance, or of Obamacare repeal? There is ultimately no answer aside from the tautology that they must do it because they said they would do it. They have done and will continue to do profound damage, but the right-wing alternative as currently construed is a dead end that does not open out onto any real positive project.
Much more promising are the proposals on the left, where freedom means freedom from exploitation and precarity—which is to say, from the anxiety that has become pandemic in the neoliberal age. At its most ambitious, contemporary social democracy pictures a world in which a universal basic income will free us from the compulsion to sell our labor power on the market. Such a world would be very different from the one we live in now, and in my opinion much more desirable. Yet without a positive conception of collective freedom to match its negative conception of individual freedom, it would remain as vulnerable to overthrow as the Fordist paradigm. This is because neoliberalism, unlike its emerging rivals, actually does have some minimal positive conception of freedom: the freedom to participate in the market. As hollow as it may seem, in a capitalist society market freedom is undeniably a very important freedom, because the market is where all our material needs are met. No matter how many institutions we develop to redirect or correct market forces, no matter how big a cut society takes from market profits, a society that relies on the workings of the invisible hand to supply the most nonnegotiable social goods is still fundamentally a market society. And that means that, even if the state or some other institutional form can supply a positive alternative, market freedom will remain the tacit foundation of the social order by default, a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode into another neoliberal “end of history.”
This means that any political theological paradigm that desires a real break with neoliberalism must be willing to break with the foundational role of the market. It must be willing to take responsibility for consciously and collectively directing the production and distribution of economic goods. Such a society may have room for a free market in discretionary consumer goods, but it would not allow what it considers to be its nonnegotiable needs and desires to be held hostage to profit-seeking individuals and firms. If some form of production must happen, if some need must be met, if some important cultural touchstone should be preserved, then such a society would mobilize the resources necessary to make it happen. Market mechanisms may be useful in some contexts,9 but they must be designed to serve social ends directly rather than creating a profit incentive and hoping the social end is served along the way. None of this is to say that total conscious control of the production process is possible or desirable, but the limits to that control must be discovered through experimentation rather than read off of economic models that were designed to naturalize the capitalist system. From that perspective, it does not matter whether the forms of collective action that direct production are conceived as belonging to the “state” or the “economy”—in fact, the practice of collective deliberation about production would represent the most durable possible break with that foundational binary of the modern world.
Neoliberal ideology has conditioned us all to be suspicious of any prospect for deliberate, conscious social change. It is easy to imagine the objections: “Who decides what must be produced? Who decides who gets what?” When people ask questions like that, they normally do not anticipate any possible answer. “Who decides?” is a rhetorical question, meant to end a discussion, not open one up—as though the idea of collective deliberation and action, in and of itself, is an unthinkable horror.
It is worth reflecting on this reflex reaction, which is a result of ideological formation but cannot be reduced to that. I have claimed that the political theological root of neoliberalism is freedom and have characterized its vision of freedom as hollow. Yet paradoxically, part of the appeal of neoliberalism is precisely the limitation it places on freedom. While from a certain point of view it illegitimately “responsibilizes” us for outcomes that are beyond our control, from another perspective it relieves us of collective responsibility—with all the political conflict and struggle that meaningful collective action brings with it. Even beyond the promise of superior economic outcomes, the invisible hand allows us to imagine that we can outsource our collective responsibility to a machinelike entity that will deliver outcomes that are no one’s fault because they are everyone’s fault. On the political theological level, it is a conflict-avoidance mechanism as much as and perhaps even more than an economic mechanism, but like every katechon, it has inevitably generated the very forces of conflict it hoped to stave off indefinitely.
Dismantling the invisible hand is a crucial step toward creating a new political-theological paradigm, but it is not sufficient in itself. We will need to work simultaneously to radically reconceive the economy in the most ancient sense of the household: the order of race, gender, and sexual practice. We must not assume that a reimagining of the economy will automatically achieve this, as some simplistic forms of Marxism claim. As Polanyi documents, the Fascist social order was in many respects a transformation of the market society, but the structures of race, gender, and sexual practice, far from falling away of their own accord, became unimaginably more virulent and destructive. Closer to home, we have also seen how the conservative sexual and racial mores of Fordism ultimately allowed most of its social-democratic gains to be undone, paving the way for a neoliberal state devoted to reinforcing racial hierarchy by consigning racialized populations to the hell of the carceral system. The division between economic and social problems is a dangerous illusion—both must be tackled together, without indulging the illusion that there is any preexisting standard for how either should be arranged.
Clearly, the task of building a new political-theological paradigm to replace neoliberalism is a massive one, for which there are no ready-made formulas. I promised that this conclusion would provide us with ways to recognize a genuinely new political theological paradigm when it comes, but the only infallible sign I can offer is that we will know that it is a new paradigm when we find ourselves building it. We will know that something genuinely new is in the offing when we recognize ourselves—in the broadest possible sense, with the full participation and leadership from the groups that neoliberalism subordinates and scapegoats—as part of a movement to form a social order that pursues goals that we have collectively chosen via means that we have collaboratively created. And we will know that we have truly embarked on this path when we can accept what the false idol of the omniscient market promised to eliminate: the irreducibility of political conflict. We must not imagine that agreement will automatically result if ideological blinders (such as categories of race, gender, or sexuality) or other extrinsic obstacles are removed, nor should we think that the people’s will, when truly expressed, necessarily carries with it positive results.
Both these fantasies rest on the idea that, underneath it all, the interests of the people and the means to those ends are objectively determinable. Yet the ultimate lesson of political theology is that no such final answer exists. We are always thrown back on our own devices. Human beings must create their own structures of meaning and legitimacy because there is no one else who can create them. Even if a structure of meaning and legitimacy did come down from heaven, we would still have to decide whether to accept it, and there would doubtless be considerable conflict and dissent around the question. Meaning and legitimacy are irreducibly human products, and that means that they are inevitably the result of human creativity, struggle, and conflict. Harnessing, taming, and (where possible) resolving that conflict will take more than elections or consumer choices—those centuries-old decision-making technologies that at best represent training wheels for a “world come of age”—and it may well take more than debate and persuasion. We will need to confront the question of “who decides” as a genuine question rather than a rhetorical conversation-stopper.
In the end, though, I cannot claim to know exactly what will be required or what the end result will look like, nor can anyone else. What I do know is that the alternative is to live in a world where we are continually entrapped into endorsing our own exploitation and subordination, a world where we are forced into complicity with oppression and irreversible environmental destruction. It would be more comfortable to believe that the invisible hand will find a way out or that the forces of historical progress will rescue us. Yet surely, at this late date, we can recognize that those Gods are just as dead as their medieval predecessor. And what I want to suggest in closing is that this fact is not to be lamented, but embraced. The political theological paradigm of the future will not seek to resurrect a dead God, but will start from the premise that no one can deliver us from this body of death but us.