From Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (Plehewe, Slobodian & Mirowski, 2020) pp10-1
In his final book, Hayek referred to Hardin in a section titled “the calculus of costs is a calculus of lives.” Expanding on his ideas of cultural evolutionary progress measured in the quality and quantity of lives, Hayek suggested that humans could be ranked by utility: “The good hunter or defender of the community, the fertile mother and perhaps even the wise old man may be more important than most babies and most of the aged.” “The requirement of preserving the maximum number of lives,, he wrote, “is not that all individual lives be regarded as equally important”.
The far-right strain of neoliberalism deploys a similarly dispassionate calculus of human lives. The national community is not privileged for its transcendent value (in the Herderian sense of the Volk) but because of the utility of cultural homogeneity for stability and the accumulated cognitive capital of the population in industrialized nations. Combining critiques of foreigners and the welfare state with calls for closed borders and private property rights has become standard fare for right-wing neoliberals in the new millennium. A case in point is Erich Weede, sociology professor, MPS member since 1992, and leader of the right wing of the German Hayek Society. In an article from 2016, Weede, who has argued for the genetic basis of differential “human capital” endowments and has correlated economic growth to IQ called for the closing and fortification of borders to prevent the influx of refugees. Using an intergenerational zero-sum logic, he wrote that “one must not forget that governments are always dispensing other peoples money – or in the case of higher and rising state debts, even the money of underage and yet unborn tax payers. Those who give governments the freedom to do good for foreigners must by necessity take freedom and property away from citizens. Lifeboat neoliberalism sees empathy as feckless state spending and openness to foreigners as a downgrading of human capital.
Rather than posing a globalist neoliberalism against a neo-nationalist and social conservative populism, we must remain mindful of the elasticity of neoliberal norms and principles. Principles of competition, private property, and consumer sovereignty can be tied to human rights, multicultural tolerance, and recognition of minorities as well as exclusionary bonds based in culture and race. Neither left nor right had much affinity to neoliberal-style individualism historically. But the advance of neoliberal worldviews expanded certain ideas at the expense of competing notions of individualism and solidarity. Social democracy has become less concerned with redistribution under the impact of advancing neoliberal understandings of social life, while conservatism has become less concerned with tradition under the impact of advancing neoliberal understandings of competitiveness. The way in which neoliberal core ideas have made inroads and been absorbed by competing worldviews is among the most important reasons for the longevity of neoliberalism in spite of the perceptions of its eternal crisis.
The task at hand is twofold: observe the historical development and expansion of neoliberal ideas, or the morphology of neoliberal worldviews in their own right, while also tracking the linkages of elements of those worldviews to competing ideologies, or the mixed morphologies of both conservative-neoliberal and progressive-neoliberal perspec-tives. Both more progressive and conservative fusions with neoliberalism result in patterns of exclusive solidarity: progressive neoliberals preach recognition but not redistribution, and conservative neoliberals abandon the humanitarian face of social order. Once belief and trust in mutual and comprehensive solidarity is lost, communities of competition constitute themselves against one another: core workforce against peripheral workers, rich communities against poor, and so on. The current fusion of neoliberalism and right-wing populism is a consequence of the unleashed notion of the competition state, the competition region, and the competitive units of and within the enterprise. The social reproduction of the moral underpinnings of neoliberal order – communitarian notions of self-help and caring, social responsibility for those in close proximity — can be regarded as compensation for social redistribution and welfare, but it may not develop fast enough or at the same speed as the centrifugal notions of selfishness and competitiveness. Only time will tell when neoliberalism will use up its next—or even final-life.
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