Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London: Verso, pp. 368. 2020

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. London: Verso, pp. 288. 2019.

James Carrier (ed.) After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath. London: Routledge, pp. 212. 2016.

In 2012, supporters of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory's motion that ‘the concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century’ (Eriksen et al. 2015) worried that as ‘neoliberalism’ was used in ways increasingly vague and moralising in anthropology's ethico-narrative duty to ‘speak truth to power’ (see Mair's discussion of neoliberalism as a moral schema in Eriksen et al. 2015), it was becoming hard to tell what neoliberalism actually was. Ten years on, it is increasingly hard for those committed to that moral schema to tell us at least what neoliberalism is not. They have found that what they and their interlocutors define as post-neoliberalism is often, in fact, a technocratic neoliberalism of tokenised diversity (Riofrancos 2020); that the ethical projects of care and social duty often portrayed as morally superior and opposed to neoliberalism in fact make sense within, and reproduce, the latter's logics (Muehlebach 2012); and that even the outcasts of the world's periphery whose truths power needs to hear about also, actually, think through ‘neoliberal’ calculation (Gago 2017).

Reviewing new work from scholars in the history and philosophy of economic thought alongside a recent edited volume on anthropological theory, this article will show it is no coincidence that, of all terms, neoliberalism has entrapped anthropology in a loop redolent of disciplinary exhaustion. We will find that neoliberalism always was, and remains, a moral, not economic project and telos; that the moral core of neoliberalism always required and promoted a versatile, contingent approach to policy, eschewing grand narratives and big pictures in favour of the immanent, intersubjective truths of the market; and that, paradoxically, our discipline's postmodern, poststructural and culturalist turns in the late twentieth century adjusted to neoliberalism's moral core and an uncannily similar ethico-epistemological approach, denying itself in the process a ground to genuinely reflect outside of neoliberalism, even and especially when attempting to critique it.

According to Slobodian and Plehwe's introduction to Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, which they edited with Philip Mirowski, the 2009 publication of The Road from Mont Pèlerin, (edited by the latter two), enticed economic historians and philosophers to examine self-defined neoliberal institutions and intellectuals for the clues the social sciences and humanities were missing in their diagnoses of neoliberalism as a thing and as a problem. In anthropology, as James Laidlaw (Eriksen et al. 2015) points out, Stephen Collier (2011) suggested keeping the term neoliberalism for analyses of these very specific circumstances; but these historians and philosophers did something else. Arguing that the naturalisation of neoliberal governance began in the 1940s instead of the 1970s and 1980s, Jessica Whyte's The Morals of the Market claims neoliberalism was, and remains, a fundamentally moral project. The book is structured around the parallel emergence of the neoliberal collective of intellectuals, including those in the Mont Pèlerin Society but also others in satellite think thanks and policy centres, and of the discourse of human rights as we know it today. In the long aftermath of World War II, human rights discussions under the aegis of the United Nations drew in imperial nations, nonaligned semi-peripheries and representatives of newly independent or soon-to-be independent countries to draft what came to be known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

With the precision of a chronicler but the reasoning of a philosopher, Whyte shows how self-described neoliberals (who at the time occupied key policymaking positions in transnational governance, like sections of the United Nations itself) fought to distinguish, from the melee of demands for rights, a strict baseline of civic and political rights. To live, to trade, to speak one's mind, to move, to own property, to enter into lawful association, were, they argued, indispensable for the moral order that needed to underpin any human society. These rights were the stuff of freedom, individual choice but cooperative interdependence, self-reliance but mutual benefit: for neoliberal intellectuals there was ‘no such thing as the economy’ (84), and to even speak of such a thing was to confuse this universal moral baseline with the fruits only it could bear. Once this moral order was guaranteed, if necessary, by transnational intervention and brutal force, the rest would follow. One could argue, as most nations on earth did, that in destitute places the distinction between, for example, the right to life and the right to basic income is meaningless; or that this moral order is illusory, cynical, patriarchal and ultimately geared to protect Western dominance and access to resources. Yet the point The Morals of the Market makes is that neoliberal intellectuals and the transnational institutions they ruled succeeded in naturalising the grammar of this moral project as a baseline beyond the boundaries of their strict neoliberal project, to the extent that materialist critiques struggle to position themselves with respect to it.

Mentioned yet underexplored in the book is the fact that elements of this moral baseline echo millenarian humanist and Judaeo-Christian ethics, another reason for their intuitive traction in both global neoliberalism and global critiques of neoliberalism. But in the twentieth century, Whyte argues, the naturalisation of the neoliberal order as moral, and of its normative content, happened to a great extent as human rights discourses universalised, for their own reasons, those same civic and political rights. In a particularly compelling chapter examining how neoliberal intellectuals defended Pinochet's dictatorial Chile as a moral beacon in a developing world at risk of immoral degradation, Whyte shows how human rights organisations abandoned the fight over the ‘big picture’ (160), avoided with surgical precision what they circumscribed as contested political and economic territory (179) and focused less on utopias or alternative realities and more on witnessing and retelling the experience of those that were suffering ‘because they were suffering’ as a genre and as a way to make room for those rights (203). In so doing they not only naturalised the presumed universality of the neoliberals’ civic and political rights (and the distinction between those rights and the ‘big picture’ social and economic rights that peripheral discourses fought so much to dispel), but they also transposed them as the language of the experience of others, legitimising in so doing all the inequalities and structural violences they now had no language for and ‘neoliberalising’ the discourse of alterity. In other words, in the resulting discourse that influences engaged and activist anthropology, but also the very ethical mission of speaking truth to power, the grammar that mobilises claims on behalf of the weak and destitute is often one that mirrors the morals of neoliberalism: the immanent, universal right to choose, the sovereign freedom to move, speak, trade, and so forth. At stake here is not whether we agree or not with this disciplinary ethics, but rather that aside from magnifying confusion around the term, the Manichean focus on neoliberalism as an economic and political project is missing the defining moral core of whatever goes by the term neoliberalism.

In this same spirit, reminding those who insist on the alleged neoliberal emphasis on homo economicus that Hayek himself declared the latter ‘a skeleton’ as early as 1937, Slobodian and Plehwe's introduction to Nine Lives of Neoliberalism reframes neoliberalism bluntly as a strong-state interventionism whose axiomatic morality is to protect and foster the free market.

Neoliberal intellectuals had learned from World War I that laissez faire policy would not lead to the spontaneous expansion of free markets. Also, as Whyte showed, they witnessed with alarm the rise of state economic planning, social welfarism, unionism and anti-colonial struggles during the mid-twentieth century. For both reasons, contrary to popular and academic understandings of neoliberal theory, the latter's intellectuals firmly believed free markets were a normative optima to actively fight for, not a natural occurrence.

Precisely because of the multifarious nature of such attacks on free markets, contributors to the volume argue, neoliberalism never sought to be a consistent policy, but always a consistent approach to policy towards protecting the free market, a morality unequivocal in its ‘spare and logical clarity’ (Carrier 1997: 14).

The most accessible to anthropological reasoning and methodologies, Slobodian's chapter on incompatible neoliberal approaches to patents and intellectual property, and Schmelzer's on the abandonment of the gold standard show how, even amongst self-professed neoliberal intellectuals, different interpretations of the same goals of creating competitiveness and free market circulations led to open disagreement and contradictory policies (71–78 and 206, respectively). Similarly, Cooper's chapter on the alliance between neoliberal intellectuals and neoconservative family approaches, in principle paradoxical for an intellectual movement pivoting on freedom of choice, shows how competing understandings of gendered and reproductive labour, responsibility and accountability were actually seeking to serve the same purpose of protecting and maximising market freedoms (96). Tracing the rise of behavioural economics, Graf shows how neoliberals argued for the incorporation of psychological, ethnological, sociological and any kind of insight to produce any policy or its opposite across the partisan board so long as they promoted the unmovable goals of competitiveness and market freedoms (156). Ultimately, the free market core of competition, private property and consumer sovereignty was always amenable to be ‘tied to human rights, multicultural tolerance, and recognition of minorities as well as exclusionary bonds based in culture and race’, and several other pairings of mutually exclusive worldviews (11). From this perspective, anthropologists’ dismay that two mutually exclusive policies can work towards a ‘neoliberal’ goal is less proof of neoliberalism's alleged ability to co-opt alternatives or embody everything that is wrong and evil, and more evidence of our persistent misrepresentation of neoliberalism as an economic blueprint.

Recent ethnographies in economic sociology have joined this line of inquiry; for example, Neyland et al. (2019) developed the notion of ‘market sensibilities’ to refer to competition, private property, investment and other tropes that make up the moral stuff of neoliberalism's core and that various policies tend to enact. To the argument Whyte already made and to anthropological concerns with neoliberalism and the confusion around it, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism contributes a different window into the nature of this moral project. As Beddelem's chapter shows, during the welfarist 1940s neoliberal intellectuals like Mises and Hayek argued economic relations were too complex to be understood by a single place, plan or mind: truth, the reality of relations, was an intersubjective, emergent, fragmented process, whose locus was the immanence of the market (24–26, 31). Planning, centralised allocation or big picture propositions by definition harm, misapprehend and destroy those relations and the moral order they embody. In a move that would prove strangely premonitory of the state of anthropology today, Hayek further advanced the point: scientific knowledge, in fact knowledge tout court, must endorse the epistemic superiority of the marketplace, of those intersubjective relations, if it is to be legitimate at all, as Nik-Khan reveals (68). This is not a morality of homo economicus, or one even hinging on caricaturised undersocialised, profit-driven individuals: this is a moral project opposing the way of knowing grand theories put forward, vindicating the immanent experience of that intersubjectivity as a site of truth that does not need to make itself knowable to other epistemologies, or to anything other than itself.

After the Crisis argues this neoliberal ethico-epistemological orientation to knowledge paradoxically resembles that of anthropology in the ‘afterological’ decades, broadly speaking the years since the early 1980s. In the two chapters editor James Carrier contributes to this purely theoretical anthropological volume, he examines how the publication of Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture and Ortner's ‘Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties’ changed our understanding of the nature of anthropological knowledge, the nature of the world of our interlocutors and the proper relations we are to entertain with them. On the one hand, the abolition of grand narratives and disciplinary authority together with the imperative to yield to the experience of our collaborators called anthropologists to relate to their fields in a manner analogous to that neoliberals required of governments with respect to the market (26–29): forego patterns, structures and the attempt to abstract and extrapolate, and instead epistemologically submit to the ‘lived experience’ of our interlocutors, intersubjective, immanent, fragmented. Rather than complementing grand narratives, which one could argue is what Ortner was actually after, these critiques sought to make a political point of their outright dismissal, a point echoing the morals of US individualism. This individualism is not a linear transposition from neoliberal theory, reverberating also with the protestant and humanist ethics that had long influenced US academic and social life; but it did buttress the moral case for the analogy between big picture institutions and hurdles to individual freedom and between big narratives and their alleged unsuitability to capture the new subject of knowledge: the self's experience qua experience.

The ethical project the postmodern, poststructural turn brought to anthropology was compounded by the cultural turn, calling anthropologists to disavow the ‘craving for intelligibility’, the same craving Hayek asked policy makers to shelve. Having militantly denied itself both epistemological authority and some, any, sort of shared ground or big picture such that experiences would at least be commensurable from some, any, perspective, anthropology backed itself into a corner. Once in this corner, the cultural turn provided the discipline with the impulse to reorganise itself around the task of interpreting and recording, instead of analysing and incorporating, potentially infinite experiences in their own, irreducible terms (40–41). This task included putting forward subjectivities and identities and their sovereign self-reflection on meaning as an ‘intentional process of a transcendental subjectivity’ (Dilley 1999: 31, in Stan's chapter, page 117) as sites of resistance to hegemonic discourses that cannot but hinder the expression and celebration of human diversity (28). This anthropology partakes in the testimonial and denunciatory ethos oriented towards those who suffer ‘because they are suffering’ that Whyte identified in human rights discourse, as previously mentioned. That ethos, in turn, enhances in our discipline a curious ethical imperative where authorial legitimacy and self-effacement legitimise rather than cancel each other out: the denouncing ethnographer who is also, after all, one of many actors reacting to the transient immanence of the field and its relations.

Whereas Carrier is careful not to imply this neoliberal anthropology is a linear consequence of the rise of neoliberal governance (and, as we have previously seen, of the rise of neoliberal human rights and the universalisation of its tenets of individual freedom, sovereign choice and teleological self-determination), the point is that this anthropology, paradoxically the most invested in the ethico-narrative project of resistance and speaking truth to a power it refers to as neoliberalism, is much, much more consonant with orthodox neoliberal philosophy than it probably imagines. The other contributors expand on specific aspects of this neoliberal anthropology: Dullo shows how the abdication of authority also means this anthropology declines actual responsibility for the claims it makes, now framed as pure transpositions of the native's point of view, which conveniently ignores the fact that it is the anthropologist who decides which natives are to be heard and taken seriously in an immensely moral project increasingly unable to even consider empathising, for the sake of analytical rigour, with those the ethnographer disagrees with (150). Stan's complex argument expands on the individualistic, idealist and narcissistic elements of this neoliberal anthropology whose practitioners increasingly resemble neoliberal economists, approaching the field with a ‘holism’ that makes it fundamentally impossible to even recognise any patterns, but also to be held accountable for missing them. Equally critical, Maskovsky and Susser strike a more conciliatory tone, inviting this neoliberal anthropology to incorporate some moral and political economy to more powerfully address the grievances and experiences it seeks to record with a frame in which they can make sense beyond the immediate boundaries of the selves it studies.

In and of itself, historicising neoliberalism through its most fervent practitioners’ declarations and policy debates could amount to little more than a pedantic exercise amongst anthropologists trying to figure out why neoliberalism persists or arguing against the careless bandying about of this term. The anthropological relevance of the arguments The Morals of the Market and Nine Lives of Neoliberalism make lies in helping us reframe a debate that persists in considering neoliberalism an amoral, or immoral, narrow, instrumental calculation, regardless of how we feel about the particular normative content of neoliberalism's moral core. Once inside it, not only do we find that it resonates in many ways with longstanding and celebrated ethical dispositions around the world but that for half a century, the moral economy of much anthropological knowledge has been working through the same epistemology and politics of knowledge of that which it has arguably attempted to oppose with the greatest fervour, a realisation that may well be the first step towards imagining, and theorising, a genuinely alternative moral order.

Juan M. del Nido

University of Cambridge