Writing in The Boston Globe, Walter Benn Michaels explains how American universities and colleges play a crucial role in promoting a neoliberal world view regarding inequalities. By promoting the virtues of 'respecting the other,' an ethos borrowed from multiculturalists, and creating the illusion that they are meritocracies, these institutions of higher education enable students and alumni to justify the extreme material inequalities in American society. As Michaels notes, "The imaginative world of neoliberalism, then, is a world where it's OK for a few people to be rich and a lot of people to be poor but where it's definitely not OK to make anyone feel bad about being poor."
The bottom line is this: "for neoliberals...it's prejudice not poverty that counts as the problem." Moreover, this lack of concern about eliminating or reducing poverty is displaced by a concern (whether faux or genuine doesn't really matter) about eliminating or reducing class prejudice, a position that left-wing and right-wing egalitarians both share.
Michaels' article begins by examining how two recent novels about contemporary life at America's elite schools, Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep and Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons can be read as products of the neoliberal imagination. His analysis is particularly good at identifying why the authors chose to set their books on college campuses:
Schools loom larger in the neoliberal imagination than they did in the liberal imagination because where the old liberalism was interested in mitigating the inequalities produced by the free market, neoliberalism-with its complete faith in the beneficence of the free market-is interested instead in justifying them. And our schools have a crucial role to play in this. They have become our primary mechanism for convincing ourselves that poor people deserve their poverty, or, to put the point the other way around, they have become our primary mechanism for convincing rich people that we deserve our wealth.
Michaels skewers neoliberals for making classism, understood on the multicultural model of failing to respect cultural differences, appear to be the core problem. By making this move, which not only accepts poverty as a given but also naturalizes material inequalities, neoliberals have effectively become conservatives.
On this model, then, class is turned into clique and, once the advantages of class are redescribed as the advantages of status, we get the recipe for what we might call right-wing egalitarianism: Respect the poor. Which is also, as it turns out, the recipe for left-wing egalitarianism.
If in 1950 Trilling thought there were no conservatives or reactionaries, we might say today that there are only conservatives and reactionaries. Where the neoliberal right likes status instead of class, the neoliberal ''left" likes cultural identity, and its version of ''respect the poor" is ''respect the Other." That's why multiculturalism could go from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management technology in about 10 minutes.
Today, what Trilling called ''diverse social classes" has turned into what we just call diversity. And diversity gives us what we might call the fantasy of a left politics-a politics defined by its opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia and hence by the idea that what we should do with difference is not eliminate it but appreciate it.
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eric--interesting piece. thanks for linking it. not totally sure i buy the connection with identity politics or some of what he has to say about the left. not sure it captures a dynamic (on the right as well as on the left--let's not forget who rammed 'welfare reform' through) in which the republicans claim the mantle of anti-elitism and populism (with a president born with a platinum spoon in his mouth) while simultaneously denouncing the people left behind in new orleans, slashing social programs, and continuing to demonize 'welfare queens.' also not sure it's entirely acurate to claim that people don't talk about class in classrooms (or that talking about race or gender and so on is not also talking about class). is interesting insight into the right's strategy to defuse criticism of their class warfare (and some of why democrats are afraid to talk about it.
-claire.
I am in no way qualified to discuss literary theory, but I have to mention a longstanding bugbear of mine, when reading posts like this.
...neoliberalism-with its complete faith in the beneficence of the free market...
Now, I realize you are not the author of this sentence, but if you can please tell me: Why do leftists talk about "faith in the free market"? It doesn't take "faith" to believe in the free market; it simply takes a pair of open eyes. The free market has succeeded, and enabled its participants to succeed, right off the scale in this country. It's socialism that requires faith in order to believe in it, given its record of ruining so many captive people's lives.
Dear Sanity Inspector,
Three points--one linguistic/philosophical:
1. The author, Walter Benn Michaels, does not say faith in the free market but faith in the beneficence of the free market. Beneficence is a moral principle that one should help others further their important and legitimate interests. He is describing a neo-liberal belief that the market is benevolent, that is that it leads to an improvement in the well-being of all persons and that advocacy of the market is itself a virtue. This is indeed something that neoliberals import into thinking about free market capitalism which has often been seen as value-free (the independent pursuit of self-interest). In fact, if you look at the godfather of the free market, Adam Smith, he himself argued that the free market must be tempered by moral virtue. In A Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for a moral theory of sympathy in which sympathy for others is a starting point for human relationships (arguing explicitly against pragmatic principles like utility embraced by others like Hume). Even economic relationships needed to be supplemented by a notion of sympathy. Neo-liberals often assume that the market itself produces beneficent consequences and therefore need not be supplemented by any sort of political, social or moral intervention. I believe this is Michael's point. Rather than embracing the old-fashioned liberal view of someone like Mill who was a free market advocate but someone who also believed that conditions of inequality were not only immoral but also impediments to genuine democracy or a completely value-neutral view in which the economic consequences of the market are the only concern (rather than moral), neo-liberals assume that the market iself is good, therefore its consequences must be good. This is faith in the beneficence of the market.
Empirical questions about things I can't quite decipher even with my open eyes:
2. When you say that the "free market has succeeded" how are you measuring success? Wealth? Happiness? Justice? Equality? Are you measuring just within the United States? Globally? Among economics and sociologists there certainly is robust debate about how much wealthier Americans are--and which Americans are wealthier. And this would require comparison with other places. Certainly inequality has increased globally (the economic status of the average person living on the continent of African, for instance, has declined over the past 20 years in spite of a marketization of many economies as a result of World Bank policies). And how does the U.S. stack up against other economies, especially the "socialist" ones of which you speak? Perhaps the United States can boast of a higher per capita income, but also higher rate of, for example, infant mortality which is generally seen as an indicator of poverty.
3. Where is this free market of which you speak? Certainly not the United States where we have robust government subsidies for businesses, no-bid contracts, and the like. Check out our communications industry where we see that the combined impact of deregulating the industry while giving very large subsidies. The result? Americans pay far more for our telecommunications than the socialist Europeans. And they get better service to boot. I'm not entirely convinced I've ever seen a "free market."
Wally:
Thanks for taking the time to compose that for my benefit.
I cannot address much of your first point, since I'm not sure what "neo-liberals" are, let alone what they are supposed to believe. A lacuna in my knowledge of political taxonomy, unfortunately... Reminds me of the 1988 election, though; when Sen. Paul Simon said, "I am not a neo-anything. I am a Democrat."
Other than that, I'd only submit G. K. Chesterton's observation that, when we say that there is too much capitalism, that doesn't mean that there are too many capitalists. It means that there are too few.
As for 2&3, of course anything can be considered a failure if judged by high (or irrelevant) enough standards, just as anything can be termed a success if judged by low enough standards. It seems to me that a fair evaluation of the efficacy of the free market would include consideration how open it5 is to entrants, and how far it can take people who are willing to participate in it, factoring in no guarantees in life, & etc. The existence of a huge, deep, and robust middle class, in this country, and all the immigrants, must count as Exhibit A in favor of the proposition. It's certainly a marked contrast with Latin American economies, which up til recent decades really were what the Left always insisted American society is: a thin scum of wealth atop a huge abscess of poverty.
Robust subsidies for business? We have robust subsidies for everything nowadays. (Have a look through the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance at you leisure. Heft an old ringbound paper edition of it if you get the chance--but don't drop it on your toe! (Or see a free market version here) But nothing, or not much, is stopping anyone from going into business, as happens in so many foreign countries. You don't have to bribe the SBA or the state licensing boards to incorporate. (Complying with the ever-changing regs and tax laws is another matter.) Before it was given back to the mainland, Hong Kong had the slimmest paperwork requirements for incorporation in the free world, and hence one of the most disproportionately explosive economies.
The Europeans are indeed eating our lunch in a number of economic areas, at present. But while Schweppes owns Dr. Pepper, the British government does not own Schweppes. So, it isn't quite socialism going on there. And we needn't quibble about "pure" free markets or "pure" socialism--there's no such thing as pure anything in human social affairs, save pure evil, occasionaly. As for the Europeans wireless service, that may be a passing thing. France's Minitel was supposed to be the ideal that the U.S. should copy, years ago, but thank goodness we invented the internet instead. It's been such a success that the EU is now trying to take control of it by sheer bureaucratic will.
The free market might have more of a fighting chance in Africa if they could get rid of their kleptocratic Presidents For Life, and also if the EU would drop their trade barriers to African produce. I think one African entertainer made a plea specifically on that second item from the stage at Live8 earlier this year.
Well, this is getting entirely too long. Let me just say that I doubt that all those economists and sociologists waxing skeptical about the existence of the free market virtuously keep their portfolios empty of everything except muni bonds and T-bills. As someone said years ago, let us not pretend to doubt in our philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
I'm not sure that you must understand neo-liberalism to understand that you have mis-read Michaels's point here. From Paul Treanor here is a very brief definition of neo-liberalism:
Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services, and without any attempt to justify them in terms of their effect on the production of goods and services; and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.
As I stated, where this differs from traditional liberalism (in the Lockean or Millian sense) is that the market becomes the ethic which was never so in traditional capitalist or liberal literature which believed that the market was an autonomous sphere but not the only or primary source of value in human life. In other words, more traditional liberals like Mill could, on the one hand, say that the free market ought to reign in the economic sphere but that in judging society we had to develop principles of justice, fairness, equality and so on.
For some, the existence of a sizeable lower class in America may be evidence of certain failures in the beneficence of the free market. And your point about the EU and Africa (which, I would add, is also true of the United States which, through assorted agricultural policies has also hamstrung aid and development in Africa) is precisely my point. As many would point out, the capitalist successes of some have been built on the backs of others. To see the vast immigration to America as solely the product of the greatness of the American economy is a bit myopic. American economic policies have also created some of the economic conditions which immigrants flee. And, of course, the vast immigration to the United States is an important piece of our capitalist economy whereby wages are depressed by a continual pool of low wage workers who live in less than middle-class conditions.
As for your last point, I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to say. You yourself have acknowledged that we have a mixed economy (as do all world economies) which means that advocates of a free market should really say "a modified version of the free market where we subsidize what I like and only what I like." Making a deposit in an investment account is no more an acknowledgment of or endorsement of a free market in the United States than is your probable contributions to a social security account an acknowledgment of or endorsement of socialism.
And, as a social scientist, I can tell you our salaries are hardly high enough to give us robust investment portfolios.
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