Is it possible to extract a political theory from the constellation of postwar ideas that self-identified as neoliberal? What would be the elements and arc of such a theory, its immanent norms and ideals, its tensions or aporias? Did the theory inform and shape actual regimes in recent decades, and if so, how? And how might certain current political predicaments be refracted through appreciation of this theory?
These important questions animate Thomas Biebricher’s superbly researched, artfully constructed, and impressively even-handed contribution to the growing literatures on neoliberal intellectual history and “actually existing neoliberalism.” He moves from the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann to the contemporary European Union technocracy and across neoliberal thought in Germany, Austria, Chicago, and Virginia to map the explicitly political architecture of neoliberal theory and practice. He underlines the significance of fascism, communism, and totalitarianism, and not only Keynesianism, in fomenting neoliberalism’s response to simmering crises of liberalism that came to a head in World War II. And he works expertly with the major and minor works of the classical neoliberal thinkers themselves, rendering the book both a trustworthy introduction to and skillful analysis of its subject.
Deriving a political theory from classical neoliberal thought has three distinct challenges, each of which Biebricher faces directly. First, “neoliberal” is a shorthand for the non-unified ensemble of postwar thinkers hailing from Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Switzerland, and the United States who gathered under the rubric of the Mont Pelerin Society but pursued most of their work separately from one another. Formed by what Biebricher terms different “fields of adversity” (collectivism, the Keynesian welfare state, paleoliberalism, fascism, republicanism) and trained in different disciplines (economics, philosophy, sociology, politics), these thinkers also differently appraised the limits of classical liberalism (pp. 18–21). If they all demonized socialism, an overreaching state, and democratic excess, they differed on how best to secure “the political and social conditions for functioning markets” (p. 26). Establishing these conditions constitutes what Biebricher terms “the neoliberal problematic”; what distinguishes neoliberalism from its classical ancestor, laissez-faire political economy, is the extent to which markets require careful political construction and support. This in turn is what makes a political theory indispensable.
Second, any claim that a political theory derived from the classical neoliberal texts bears on the present requires dealing with the interval between the postwar intellectuals and the later rollout of neoliberal regimes. This means reckoning with features such as financialization and postnational political entities that were not on the landscape of the founding thinkers, as well as the significant variation across neoliberal political regimes in Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe, and even within Europe and the United States.
Third, any effort to relate intellectual history to concrete historical developments raises the question of how this influence occurred. Against approaches in which intellectuals are portrayed as direct advisers to power (though this was crucial in Chile and, as Nancy MacLean has established, characterizes the role of certain US think tanks as well) or in which politicians use neoliberal texts as playbooks (though Thatcher certainly did), Biebricher draws on the neoliberals’ own understanding of how ideas become reality principles. On the one hand, there is the importance of crisis in developing what they understood as an “ideational” opportunity – as Milton Friedman famously put it, in a crisis, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” On the other hand, Biebricher argues that neoliberalism’s influence develops gradually and takes hold over time by “impregnating” action and institutions; this approximates what the Ordoliberals explicitly identified with a new form of reason or what Foucault, in his 1979 Collège lectures, identified as neoliberal political rationality.
Biebricher treats these three challenges—the disunity of neoliberal thought, the interval between the founding ideals and actually existing neoliberalism, and the challenge of linking the ideas to policy—as more than technical riddles to be solved. Instead, they undergird the complexity of his analysis: the importance of featuring heterogeneity and tensions, coherence and contradictions at the site of the common neoliberal project; the importance of grasping the form of reasoning that structures institutions, not just the decisions that emanate from them; and the importance of tracking how a regime designed for one purpose—building a competitive market economy—ends up becoming a managerial apparatus for another: technocratic crisis management in a financialized EU.
In part I, Biebricher dedicates chapters to the neoliberals’ varied approaches to the state, democracy, economic science, and politics. In the chapter on the state, Biebricher builds his account from the paradoxical problematic of how to simultaneously empower, narrowly focus, and limit the state. Exploring differences between the overtly strong statism of thinkers like Eucken and Roepke and the more covert statism of the Americans, he also probes their different concerns, from resetting general principles of federalism, the balance of power, and law’s purpose to the specifics of achieving balanced budgets or countering the moral effects of capitalist proletarianization. The chapter on democracy traces neoliberal challenges to popular sovereignty, majority rule, and pluralism, each of which threatens a liberal market order. All the neoliberals sought to delegitimize and deinstitutionalize mass democratic demands and interest group pluralism, but their strategies for insulating the state from these phenomena differed. They ranged from Hayek’s aim to restrict legislatures to universal rule-making and legitimation of liberal authoritarianism to the ordoliberal investment in depoliticized technocracy and an “economic constitution.” Similarly, the fascinating chapter on science traces the disparate degrees of confidence the neoliberals had in economic science, from those who essentially thought the state should be largely run by economists to those who were dubious about all claims to comprehensive knowledge, including those of economics.
The final chapter of part I, on politics, examines among other things the mobilization of politics for the transition to neoliberalism. Here, Biebricher reveals how, for the neoliberals, a political iron fist may operate within a liberal frame to throttle democratic will formation while protecting private liberties. Thus, across neoliberal thinking, “totalitarian democracy” (aka social democracy) may be legitimately replaced by “dictatorial liberalism,” at least in the transitional period. Yet even this device does not settle how an order premised on constructivist and organicist elements, forthrightly eschewing planning, and reliant on the spontaneity of markets and on “re-rooting” homo oeconomicus in the pastoral family could be fashioned from the political-economic order it strives to vanquish. So how did ideas that lacked a plan for their own instantiation become the ruling ideas of our age?
Part II approaches this question not by the usual means of reflecting on the early decades of neoliberalism but by focusing on the post-2008 crisis of the European Union. Why did the EU and United States deal so differently with the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath? Why did the EU undertake austerity that prolonged its recovery when the United States did not? Here, Biebricher develops his (and the neoliberals’) argument that ideas matter, especially in acrisis and when there is uncertainty. He argues that ordoliberal ideas, particularly those of Walter Eucken, shaped the European Union/European Monetary Union response to the crisis and that, since 2009, the growing ordoliberalization of the EU has entailed development and administration of depoliticized and undemocratic rules for intra- and international European competitiveness. The EU is thus realizing the ordoliberal technocratic ideal of a supervenient political entity that prizes markets above all and is insulated from popular demands or popular sovereignty.
Biebricher offers multifold “proof” of the influence of ordoliberalism in recent EU developments. There is the importance of Eucken’s text to EU policy makers and their setting of economic rules and thresholds enforced by sanctions. There is the economic theory that guided the handling of the financial crisis and its aftershocks in southern Europe: it incorporated a specific model of economic competition and punishing austerity measures. And there are the political principles guiding the management of the crisis. Here Biebricher identifies the authoritarian model of politics embodied in the Troika—“analogous to a liquidator in a private insolvency”—and in a European Commission invested with powers of “surveillance, monitoring, and, if need be, sanctioning of member states that strike at the heart of a core competence of national parliaments” (p. 216). Indeed, the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) established in 2011, with its set indicators, scoreboard, and semiautomatic triggering of powerful sanctions, epitomizes ordoliberal scientism and technocracy. Thus, Biebricher concludes that the European Commission has become precisely that undemocratic economic rule setter, umpire, and enforcement power that ordoliberalism sought from the state.
Biebricher’s argument of steady EU de-democratization by ordoliberalism is persuasive and disturbing. Still, one wishes that its implications for the present and future of European democracy, which are compressed into the last few pages of the book, were more fully drawn. (His final ominous claim, that “if Europe does not manage to redemocratize its will-formation and repoliticize some of its institutions, there is a distinct danger that its ordoliberalization will slowly stagger toward its eventual completion,” is notably undeveloped and makes no mention of contemporary nationalist rebellions against this process [p. 224].) One also wishes that Biebricher’s consideration, in part I, of the ordoliberal aim to fortify a pastoral patriarchal morality had not dropped away from part II, given its relevance to Thatcherism in an earlier decade and to broader contemporary developments on the Right, including in the United States and Latin America. One might wish, too, that after a relatively expansive and transcontinental treatment of the several strands of neoliberal thought and its applications, Biebricher had not narrowed the focus of the final discussion to an ordoliberalizing European Union.
More generally, Biebricher’s interpretive and critical claims are sometimes frustratingly brief and underdeveloped. Perhaps this exchange will be an occasion for him to expand on them. That said, Biebricher fulfills his promise to identify a political theory in neoliberal ideas, to treat these ideas seriously and critically, and to reveal their relevance to building actually existing neoliberalism. The work is an important contribution to both the academic literature on neoliberal thought and understanding contemporary crises of liberal democracy.
