Philip Mirowski: Neoliberalism

[don]

"Professor Philip Mirowski author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, explains the intellectual history of Neo-liberalism, what Neo-liberals believe, making capitalists think differently, the role of think tanks in Neo-liberalism, the mythology of market supremacy..."

[don]

Re: Philip Mirowski: Neoliberalism

On Foucault’s early (late 70s) grasp on neoliberalism’s ambitions.

A. The fragmentation of identity is attendant upon an entrepreneurial version of the self.

The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like a firm, or if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other … (it) must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.

B. A entrepreneurial regimen for the self will eventually extend the purview of its calculus to every conceivable social activity, and not just those normally oriented to pecuniary profit.

This happens because it renders persons more susceptible to control, and not simply due to the profit motive. Homo economicus is someone who is eminently governable. Entrepreneurship was insensibly downgraded as a narrow societal function and redefined as a set of character traits.

C. A stance of cold calculation of interest will eventually be reprocessed as a new, warm, soulful form of moral economy.

Quoting Margaret Thatcher: “Choice is the essence of ethics, good and evil only have meaning insofar as a man is free to choose.”

D. The malleability of the self presumed by the theory of human capital investment will extend down to the most basic corporal level, which will eventually mean investment in genetic manipulation.

Foucault was the first to insist that Becker’s “human capital” was a first move in the neoliberal disintegration of the self. This race to the empty bottom is the terminal meaning of “biocapital.”

E. The Entrepreneurial self cannot be passive, but must move strategically in a world rife with risk. Hence, reward and punishment are accepted by the agent as the outcome of calculated risk, not as the dictates of “justice.”

Casinos are not cynical scams taking advantage of the naive and improvident; they are the practice tables for life.

F. Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and the guarantor of neoliberal order. The neoliberal self is comfortable with this ignorance.

“You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.” Ignorance as the lynchpin of the neoliberal project … reveal that Foucault got there first.

(Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste, How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown Philip Mirowski pp 94-95)