Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore Still Neoliberalism?

Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore

Still neoliberalism? We pose this as a question in order to call attention to the problematic that runs through this issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, that of how to account for, and respond to, the tawdry array of authoritarian (re)turns that have been wit- nessed in various parts of the world in the decade since the global financial crisis of 2008—from Trump to Turkey, from the Brexit debacle to the Bra- zilian coup, and much else besides. While each of these authoritarian advances, to be sure, has its own local particularities and conjunctural specific- ities, one of the questions that lurks behind (and between) each of them is whether neoliberalism— as an always mutating project of state-facilitated market rule, propelled not least by its own limitations, contradictions, and reactionary tendencies— remains a salient and appropriate signifier, whether understood as some nebulous background condition or something more precise. (And here we run immediately into thorny issues of definition: neoliberalism as a discredited but dogged policy para- digm, as a crisis-prone mode of regulation, as an ideological default setting or socially and institu- tionally and embedded political rationality, as a bundle of reconstituted subjectivities and governmentalities, as a hegemonic project or formation?)

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But is it still neoliberalism? Do the uneven but apparently concerted turns toward authoritarian rule, which have sometimes been accompanied by a selective repudiation or partial retreat from some principles and practices of neoliberal governance, signify an “end” to neoliberalism? Or do they tell us instead that, all along, this was little more than an ideological mirage, or some misreading of surface appearances? Or should recent (re)turns to austerity, revanchism, and authoritarianism be interpreted as yet another late- stage mutation in this restlessly uneven and shape-shifting phenomenon? Our own approach to these questions has been to confront neoliberalism as an emergent mode of regulation, one that has become cumulatively embedded across multiple sites and spaces such that it increasingly defines the rules of the game and the terrain of struggle, even if never acting alone or monopolizing that terrain. This approach is grounded in the following analytical principles: first, insistence on a processual understanding of neoliberalization as a restructuring ethos, proactive and frontal in form and pro- grammatically transformative in scope and ambition, and as a result in an ongoing state of contested reconstruction; and second, recognition of the necessarily variegated character of programs and projects of neoliberalization, the uneven spatial development of which is constitutive and not a way station on a path to completeness, its reactionary face always being con- sumed (if not defined) by context-specific struggles, rollbacks, and flawed experiments (see Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2012). As a means of putting neoliberalism processes in their place, the resulting formulation of variegated neoliberalism does not provide a warrant for all-purpose, omnibus explanation, as if to install neoliberalism as a singularly self-acting and ultimate source of social causality, like some critical variant of the orthodox globalization script of the 1990s. Rather, the work that the adjectival modifier variegation does is to denote, first, that sociospatial difference is a characteristic of the conflicted “insides” of neoliberalism, which is understood as a starkly utopian project and an always thwarted totality, doomed to coexist with its (typically unloved) others, and which can therefore only be found within—and across—multiple configura- tions and in variable geometries; and second, that its invocation should never be an occasion for explanatory or political foreclosure, but an invitation to conjunctural analysis, sensitive to variable (local) projects, formations, struggles, and contestations, and at the same time recognizing the openness of emergent pathways and future horizons. This approach sets up neoliberalism not as an already known monolith but as a moving matrix of articulations, predicated on conditions of existence

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that necessarily involve programmatic incompleteness and contradictory cohabitation both in—and, once again, across—multiple sites, struggles, situations, and settings. Neither a convergence nor a diffusion model, this does not reduce neoliberalism to an essential policy package or institutional core, mechanically implemented in each and every situation. It should not be taken to mean, moreover, that Chicago School formulae or Hayekian scriptures provide some “true” insight into the project in its purified form. Nor does it imply that the actually existing neoliberalisms of today are all descendants of some original program of state transformation, courtesy of, say, Margaret Thatcher or Augusto Pinochet—even if they may continue to echo, in various ways, their predecessors and contemporaries. While actually existing programs of neoliberalization are context specific in more than trivial ways, “local neoliberalisms” exist in a state of complex interdependence; typically, they are mutually referential and sometimes dialogically connected, while invariably they are tethered to multisite processes of emulation and experimentation, such that there is always a (wider) context to each (local) context. The more-than-local fields of discursive interreferencing, institutional mime- sis, and regulatory transformation that are established through and between these multiform and multisite processes consequently exceed the sum of their individual parts, exhibiting superadditive properties, not as iron laws but always in emergence. The more-than-local form(ation) of neoliberalism is therefore also emergent, rather than unilaterally imposed or “top down,” and in its own way combinatorial, contradictory, and conjunctural. This means that dealing with (the concept of) neoliberalism—inescap- ably, we would maintain, in these circumstances of complex hegemony— represents a (still) daunting challenge, both theoretically and politically. Inconvenient as this may be, reductionist definitions will not suffice, unam- biguous conditions of existence and reproduction should not be anticipated, and convergence on some singular or ultimate form is not just around the corner. Maybe this explains why there are those who cannot be bothered with the concept, and others who consider its mere invocation to be an epic case of misdirection, if not willful delusion. Then there are those who find the concept just too baggy and capacious, or its allegedly polymorphic muta- tions just too confounding. It is notable, however, that those preferring to distance themselves from the formulation, or to stage it simply as a foil, will often do so by first reducing big-N Neoliberalism to some flat-footed convergence theory or deterministic stage model, or by taking utopian visions of the free market and the small state at face value. Along with the contributors to this special issue, as well as with Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Damien

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Cahill, Quinn Slobodian, and others, we prefer a different tack—of continuing to problematize and wrestle with the concepts of neoliberalism and neoliberalization, preferring to interpret as a constructive challenge, if not a virtue, the fact that the politics of naming, specification, reach, and relevance remain open, contested, and demanding. In this spirit, this introductory essay explores three issues as a means to contextualize the following papers. First, we address the politics of naming and labeling, and what these might mean for the elusive and shape-shifting phenomenon that is (or at some point or place may cease to be) neoliberalism. Second, we pose the taxing question of mutation, asking how it can be that this pervasive and resilient regulatory fix has been able, apparently, to adapt to crises of both internal and external origin, how it can be conjunctur- ally bound and context dependent while at the same time having no fixed abode, and how it retains a certain contradictory unity even in the face of deeply embedded sociospatial difference and endemic policy failure. And third, we conclude with some necessarily partial observations on the intermixing of late neoliberal rule and right-wing politics, and those reactionary forces that may be driving authoritarian (re)turns across the mutating cultural economy of neoliberalism.

Neoliberal, Neoliberalism, Neoliberalization: What’s in a Name? That neoliberalism remains a circulating if contestable term, after decades of fitful and fickle usage, might be considered an achievement of sorts. Repeat- edly disowned, denigrated, and dismissed, it nevertheless refuses to go away— at least circumstantial evidence, perhaps, that there is indeed “some there there.” This is not the place to revisit the extended genealogy of this troubled signifier and its contested historical geography (see Peck 2010; Cahill et al. 2018), except to observe that its turbulent fortunes, perhaps especially in the period since the Wall Street crash of 2008, have been revealing, while at the same time adding new layers of mystification and puzzlement to what has been a never-less-than-checkered history. What was to be a particularly heavy- handed reboot of this history began in the thick of that last crisis, a little over a decade ago. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wall Street crash was at the time widely interpreted as both a comprehensive repudiation and a system failure of neoliberalism by key figures on the left, from Eric Hobsbawm to Naomi Klein, who read the moment as terminal for the rolling project of financial deregulation and for the small-state consensus more generally, a view that was echoed by center-left economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and, although

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not in so many words, by the likes of Paul Krugman. Rather more surprisingly, there were also some mainstream politicians on the right and left flanks of the center ground, from France’s Nicolas Sarkozy to Australia’s Kevin Rudd, who in this uniquely disorientating context were moved to utter the hitherto unspeakable term, albeit only to declare its graceless exit (see Erlanger 2008; Rudd 2009). A common refrain across much of the commentary at the time, when real economies around the world and the credibil- ity of those charged with their stewardship were both in freefall, was that the much-maligned state would be (had to be) making a comeback—in its own way echoing the arch-neoliberal conceits of governmental withdrawal and free-market governance, as if the state had ever really gone away. Projects of neoliberalization, it has been fairly clear all along to those willing to see, have never been synonymous with a simple diminution, or withdrawal, of the state, but instead have been variously concerned with its capture and reuse, albeit in the context of a generalized assault on social-welfarist or left- arm functions, coupled with an expansion of right-arm roles and capacities in areas like policing and surveillance, incarceration and social control, and the military. Nevertheless, this kind of state project was widely believed to have met its end a decade ago in the Wall Street meltdown. What followed certainly did not align with the script of a terminal, once-and-for-all collapse of neoliberalism represented (again, somewhat mis- leadingly) as a bracketable “era” of free-market governance. As if to affirm Thatcher’s premature dismissal that there was “no alternative” to market rule, what followed in the wake of the financial crisis was, far from a retreat of neoliberalism, more like an audacious exercise in doubling down. Long- term austerity measures were (re)imposed in nations rich and poor, including those countries once regarded as the tutelary “heartlands” of the project, and its proving grounds, the United States and the United Kingdom. A new generation of structural adjustment programs targeted not only populations across the global South but also Greece, Detroit, and elsewhere. There were sustained, if scattergun, assaults on many of the old targets—public services, public budgets, and public servants; social movements and labor unions; social security, socialized healthcare, and public-education systems; and undeserving classes, the poor, and racialized others. And all the while, financial and corporate elites got away with slaps on the wrist, if that, only to be compensated in due course with yet more deregulation and further rounds of tax cuts. This unapologetic mutation of late neoliberalism, back as it were from its own grave, may have been shorn of anything approaching credible claims to moral leadership and intellectual authority, but in this reconstituted form

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it would present a yet more brutal face in its dogged defenses of political power and institutional dominance, soon to be coupled with brazen reasser- tions of the manifestly dubious case for corporate liberty, financial freedom, and social-state retrenchment. In this context, many critics would surely go along, at least some of the way, with the analysis offered by the Central Committee of the Chinese Com- munist Party that the proponents of the Washington consensus were reaping their just desserts, and had no one to blame but themselves: “Western countries, led by the United States, carry out their Neoliberal agendas under the guise of ‘globalization,’ visiting catastrophic consequences upon Latin Amer- ica, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, and have also dragged themselves into the international financial crisis from [which] they have yet to recover” (quoted in ChinaFile 2013: 4–5). So far so good, perhaps, although questions begin to arise when it comes to the party’s self-serving definition of neoliberalism, the centerpiece of this (leaked) Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere (innocuously known as “Document 9”), addressed to provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the party committee; its central ministries and state organs; the People’s Liberation Army headquarters; and major party committees along with the party leadership groups of civilian organizations. Document 9 portrayed neoliberalism as a virulent strain of “market omnipotence theory,” originating offshore, in which the advocacy of “unrestrained economic liberalization, complete privatization, and total marketization” is married to apparently principled oppo- sition to “any kind of interference or regulation by the state” (quoted in China- File 2013: 4). By presenting neoliberalism as a uniquely Western form of zero-state development, allied to a corrupted version of constitutional democracy, Document 9 went to some lengths to draw clear lines of demarcation between these ostensibly alien principles and practices and those of the con- solidated party-state. Its forthright conclusion was that increasingly strict “management of the ideological battlefield” would be required, in order to staunch the viral spread of neoliberal economics, given the threat that this poses to the idea of governmental control over macroeconomic priorities, to the network of state-owned enterprises, and to the true path to socialism with Chinese characteristics. (There would be no recognition, needless to say, that neoliberal tools and techniques had played any role whatsoever in China’s own state-assisted journey of marketization, given that markets would continue to play a “decisive role” in the project of socialist modernization.) Meanwhile, in the corrupted world of Western discourse itself, this uniquely troublesome ideological signifier was once again under attack from

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quite different quarters. There had long been criticism, not least from those occupying free-market think tanks, that neoliberal was no more than a critics’ term and empty slogan, commonly serving as a “leftist version of the secret handshake,” with practically no currency outside of university seminar rooms and certain parts of the antiglobalization movement (Norton 2001: 65). In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, however, while the political class largely reverted to its default position of never uttering the word, in some of those university seminar rooms the concept of neoliberalism has come under renewed attack, including renewed proposals to outlaw its usage or at least to strictly rein in its zones of application (see Boas and Gans-Morse 2009; Flew 2014; Venugopal 2015; Dunn 2017; Rodgers 2018). For these critics, the concept of neoliberalism is variously too promiscuous and too “structural,” a cover for all manner of slippages and political sins. Neoliberalism has been portrayed as a “conceptual trash heap” by some, as “the linguistic omnivore of our times” by others, and as a “catch-all” byword for each and every feature of contemporary life that happens to meet with the analysts’ disapproval (Boas and Gans-Morse 2009: 156; Rodgers 2018: 78; Dunn 2017: 435). Setting aside the fact that the search for consensual, airtight terminology in the field of critical social science is surely a fool’s errand, there are other reasons to question what would amount to—short of the rather extreme step of analytical banishment—the adoption of a fixed, narrow, and essentialized definition, since this is not how neoliberalism exists in the world, just as one-sided abstractions like (the) “neoliberal state” involve basic misrepresen- tations of what are (and can only be) conjunctural, more-than- neoliberal formations. Of course, there are important reasons to “look beyond neoliberalism” (cf. Parnell and Robinson 2012)—indeed, it follows from our arguments so far that doing so is necessary in order to appreciate the conjunctural, cohabitative, and combinatorial forms that variegated neoliberalisms (must) take—but should this amount to failing, in the process, to see the patterned, recurrent, and interconnected traces of neoliberalization itself, then a different kind of problem arises. As Wendy Brown (2018b: 3) has remarked, while neoliberalism may be “a loose and adaptable term [this does not mean that] we should abandon it, any more than we should abandon the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘socialism,’ or ‘liberalism’ just because they are open and contestable in meaning. Neoliberalism is semiotically loose, but designates something very specific. It represents a distinctive kind of valorization and liberation of capital. It makes economics the model of everything [including the] economization of democracy.” Against the recurrent charge that the term neoliberal should not be used because neoliberals do not acknowledge or apply it to

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themselves (Dunn 2017; Rodgers 2018), there are at least two responses. First, there is a basic distinction to be made between analytical concepts and everyday language, or what are sometimes called folk concepts. And second, well, it depends. It depends partly on context, with the somewhat contradictory idiomatic connotations of liberal in some parts of the English-speaking world sowing the kind of confusion that one does not necessarily find elsewhere, just as the meaning of the politicized label Washington consensus seems to become more, rather than less, mystifying the closer observers happen to be to the headquarters of the World Bank, the International Mon- etary Fund (IMF), and the United States capitol. But it depends in other ways too. Apparently, the Chinese Communist Party has not been alone in grappling with “problems in the ideological sphere.” One of the more remarkable episodes in the recent history of neoliberal statecraft was the public break, led by a group of senior economists at the IMF, with their own organization’s tacit but scrupulously unnamed party line, when posing the belated, rhetorical question of whether neoliberalism had been “oversold” by the agencies of the Washington consensus (Ostry, Loungani, and Furceri 2016). Arriving at an affirmative answer to this question entailed (auto)critiques of organizational hubris, serial policy failure, and faith-based policymaking (see IEO/IMF 2011; Donnan 2016). While this dissenting position surely remains a minority one in the corri- dors of power of the Washington-consensus institutions, in some ways more surprising still was the programmatic statement issued around the same time by the London-based Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a free-market think tank founded in 1977 that yields to no one in its principled defenses of the cause of liberty. Having spent decades rolling its eyes at any mention of the term neoliberal, ASI rather surprisingly declared (following an extended in-house discussion beginning sometime in 2014) that it had decided to assume full and unapologetic ownership of the moniker. Confessing that he had always “looked at the world through neoliberal eyes,” ASI’s cofounder and president Madsen Pirie (2014) reckoned that the organization’s “coming out” as neoliberal had been overdue. As an ASI colleague explained their change of nomenclature, if not heart:

You may have spotted that we’ve recently decided to start calling ourselves free market “neoliberals,” instead of libertarians. Nothing has changed about what we believe about the world, or the approach we take to making it better. But after thinking about it and discussing it among ourselves we decided that this was a clearer label for what we already believe and do. . . . We promote low, sim-

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ple taxes because we want economic growth and to give people more power over their money. . . . We promote competition in healthcare, education, utili- ties and other public services. . . . We promote globalisation and a liberal immigration system because we want to raise the living standards of people around the world through trade and investment. . . . Adopting the word “neoliberal,” then, is not a change of policy but a recognition that other labels do not describe what we’ve always been quite as well. We’re not closing the door on libertarians, Objectivists, anarcho-capitalists, Whigs, free marketeers, conservatives, voluntarists, agorists or liberals—these are our friends and allies—but these are not the words that most accurately describe us (Bowman 2016: 1–2). Words matter, evidently, for the true believers at the Adam Smith Institute, and if nothing else this long-delayed embrace of the “clear label” that is neoliberalism underscores the political, strategic, and (still) contingent work that such labels perform. In ASI’s case, the preferred reading of neoliberalism—minus the pejorative connotations typical of oppositional commentary—signifies an active preference for market-based and growth-oriented solutions that respect both individual and property rights, married to an organizational demeanor that is optimistic, “globalist,” pragmatic, “open-minded,” and concerned above all with “changing the world for the better” (Bowman 2016: 1). While taking due account of these (selective) moves to repossess the term neoliberal, there is still the nagging question of its utility as an oppositional slogan. Reflecting on the term’s increased circulation in the United States in the past decade, where there apparently (if somewhat bizarrely) remain grounds for treating it as a neologism, Daniel Rodgers (2018: 78) has protested in Dissent that it is all just too much:

Naming matters. It focuses agendas and attention. It identifies causation and strategies of action. It collects (or rebuffs) allies. Is the overnight ubiquity of the term “neoliberalism” the sign of a new acuteness about the way the world operates? Or is it a caution that a word, accelerating through too many mean- ings, employed in too many debates, gluing too many phenomena together, and cannibalizing too many other words around it, may make it harder to see both the forces at loose in our times and where viable resistance can be found? Recognizing that all such terms must be contestable, revisable, and ultimately rejectable, and that searching assessments of the political work they do (or perhaps prevent) serve these and other purposes, there are reasons to be skeptical of this most recent declaration, from the left, of a neoliberalism taboo (see Slobodian 2018a). Rodgers’s preferred strategy is to break down

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what he sees as an omnibus concept into no fewer than four component parts, each separately named—as the historical stage of finance capitalism, as the belief system of market fundamentalism, as a procorporate and crisis-exploiting policy package, and as a governing rationality rooted in com- petitition and individualism—all of which he recognizes as real and rele- vant, even as the concept (and label) that might link them together apparently is not. For Mike Konczal (2018: 3), in contrast, the utility of this amorphous connector lies with the clues it provides to “how ideology works,” as a contradictory and sprawling amalgam of ramifying and often interlocking parts: “Like any project, [neoliberalism] is far bigger than the sum of its parts. Though it contains contradictions and vulnerabilities, those show themselves most powerfully in the interplay between the pieces.” Julia Ott, for her part, concedes that it is mistaken to read neoliberalism itself as some kind of historical actor, possessed of an essential nature, and entrained upon an already fixed course, but “where Rodgers detects an unruly neologism, I per- ceive a flexible and germane analytical concept, a useful term of historical periodization, and yes, a name for the multifaceted configuration of power against which a truly diverse and democratic left could and should unite” (Ott 2018: 2). There are, in these situations, reasons to name neoliberalism that are purposeful rather than obfuscatory, and that provoke questions rather than serving as a source of preemptive, pat answers. Hence Stuart Hall’s productive line of thinking in his preparatory work for the Kilburn Manifesto:

The term “neoliberal” is not a satisfactory one. Its reference to the shaping influence of capitalism on modern life sounds recidivist to contemporary ears. Intellectual critics say the term lumps together too many things to merit a single identity; it is reductive, sacrificing attention to internal complexities and geohistorical specificity. I sympathise with this critique. However, I think there are enough common features to warrant giving it a provisional conceptual identity, provided this is understood as a first approximation. . . . I would also argue that naming neoliberalism is politically necessary, to give resistance content, focus and a cutting edge. (Hall 2017: 317–18) As a warrant neither for political defeatism nor theoretical foreclosure, this conception positions neoliberalism as a dominant and dominating hegemonic program, but not as one somehow pure, freestanding, singular, or free of contradiction. Hegemony, after all, is “a process, not a state of being. [And since no] victories are permanent or final [the project] has constantly to be ‘worked on,’ maintained, renewed, revised,” as Hall (2017: 334) explains,

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while “excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose inter- ests have not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions . . . and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew.” Neoliberalization processes, it follows, work across these contested fields, often commingling with other sources and vec- tors of social and economic power. In practice, they are not so easily brack- eted in time or space (as the vestiges of an era that has passed, or as phenomena located over there but not in here), yet neither can they ever fully monopolize the terrain of struggle.

Neoliberalism Again: Still Existing, but Never Still Where there is utility, we maintain, to holding onto neoliberalism (weasel word, unruly signifier, and rascal concept that it undoubtedly is), it is as a prompt to find, specify, and learn from adaptive processes, recurring patterns, constitutive connections—across sites, domains, and registers, including those made in resistance. And the connective concept is a prompt, also, to tune into the shaping (and reshaping) of common sense, and to the often- incremental drift of institutionalization and normalization, across an always moving hegemonic terrain that is simultaneously animated by frontal projects and situated contestations. In this context, it is more than sophistry to insist upon the processual, partial, and protean character of neoliberalization, as opposed to applying the ism as a categorical label, an unqualified noun, or a source of clean-cut distinction—be it to a historical era, territorial regime, political project, or anything else. There is little to be gained from the parlor games of asserting which politician or party faction is to be properly and irretrievably branded as neoliberal, as opposed to those somehow blessed with immunity, just as it is unhelpful to propose that neoliberalization tendencies are normal and natural in some locations and contexts, but alien and exceptional in others. (How often do we see neoliberalism naturalized in large parts of the Anglo-American world or in liberal market economies, but described as a countercultural incursion elsewhere; or the complex matter of tendential, processual, partial, and contextual neoliberalizations in China or the Scandinavian countries, say, reduced to a binary choice between absolute absence or dominating presence?) From a political-economy perspective, recognizing neoliberalization as tendentially processual, always partial, and adaptively protean means con- fronting the complex and often contradictory intermixing of the practices and principles of market rule with all manner of rogue and reactionary elements,

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benign and malevolent forces, progressive compromises and complicities, and so forth, such that variegation refers not to some pretext for cartographic distractions but to what are always variable and contingent states of cohabitation (Peck 2013)—not least with varieties of authoritarianism. Meanwhile, from a Foucauldian perspective, the question becomes not one of who is, but who is not, a neoliberal today? Here, the pervasive political rationality of neoliberalism is seen as a generator of “‘reality principles’ by which we live without thinking about them,” as Brown (2018b: 2) explains, implying that it can be “quite hard to escape neoliberal rationality, including for those who imag- ine that they are radically critical of it.” From these perspectives, what might be considered to be oxymoronic formulations—like authoritarian neoliberalism or progressive neoliberalism— deserve critical attention, not as curiosities or aberrations, but as actually existing form(ation)s, as well as objects of conjunctural analysis. To under- take a conjunctural analysis is to invoke, appropriately enough, a geographical metaphor—that of terrain, and more specifically, terrains of (situated) struggle. So it was that Hall’s influential reading of Thatcherism as authoritarian populism traced its roots to the reactionary race politics of 1970s Brit- ain, which had been vividly captured in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978; Davison, Featherstone, and Schwartz 2017). Building on Nicos Poulantzas’s (2000: 203–4) notion of “authoritarian statism,” a conjunctural moment within capitalist democracies involving “intensive state control over every sphere of socio-economic life, combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties,” Hall (1988: 152) identified an emergent Brit- ish variant of authoritarian populism founded on an “‘anti-statist’ strategy” operating through the state but “which conceives of a more limited state role, and which advances through the attempt, ideologically, to represent itself as anti-statist, for the purposes of populist mobilization.” For Hall, the resulting shift from authoritarian statism to authoritarian populism represented “a movement towards a dominative and ‘authoritarian’ form of democratic class politics—paradoxically, apparently rooted in the ‘transformism’ (Gram- sci’s term) of populist discontents” (153). Likewise, what Hall would later por- tray as Tony Blair’s “double-shuffle” was an attempt to move out of the shad- ows of revanchist Thatcherism and into the sunlit uplands of economic globalization and activist government, a third-way model of “neoliberalism [that could] turn out in the end to be what Lenin might have called ‘the best shell’ for global capitalism” (Hall 2017: 311).

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On this basis, one might characterize some of the contemporary turns toward (or back to) authoritarianism—so many of them executed on the terrain of neoliberalism or in conjunction with neoliberalizing tendencies—as preludes to a more general shift toward what might be called “hard-shell” neoliberalism. Neither a cyclical nor a stagist conception, this would recognize the episodic but persistent presence of authoritarian impulses, maneu- vers, and formations ever since the earliest days of neoliberalism as a state project, back in the 1970s, most blatantly in the case of the Chilean coup, or more benignly, in the democratic deficits on which the celebrated Hong Kong model of “free-market” development was predicated (see Peck 2010; Slobodian 2018b). At the time, the neoliberal apologia was that the (necessary) achievement of economic freedom would, in due course, beget political freedom. Instead, what would be set in train, across so much of the neoliberalizing world, has been a debilitating economization of the political (see Massey 2015; Brown 2018a), coupled with all kinds of regulatory work- arounds, flanking efforts, improvised fixes, institutional compromises, policy failures, and unchecked social and environmental externalities. These have subsequently spawned an array of still-spiraling legitimation crises, especially post-2008, as some of the most deeply neoliberalized states have gone to work, as never before, on the task of hollowing out themselves through a battery of austerity measures—and this time not so much as late Keynes- ian, late developmental, or late social democratic states, but as already restructured and variably neoliberalized states. To the extent that the United Kingdom and the United States were each crucibles for a distinctive, 1980s strain of rollback neoliberalism, as pioneers of first-wave experimentation in privatization and deregulation coproduced with intense forms of deindustri- alization, financialization, and sociospatial polarization, it is surely not coin- cidental that both were to be engulfed by a peculiarly late neoliberal brand of reactionary politics, with now-storied “places left behind” among the most symbolically and strategically important battlegrounds. Amid the morbid features and monstrous effects of what might properly be called a late neoliberal conjuncture are unrestrained currents of racism, misogyny, and nativ- ism, anticipating the formation and perhaps consolidation of expressly anti- democratic, illiberal, and antisocial institutional forms:

Behold the aggrieved, reactive creature fashioned by neoliberal reason and its effects, who embraces freedom without the social contract, authority without democratic legitimacy, and vengeance without values or futurity. Far from the calculating, entrepreneurial, moral, and disciplined being imagined by Hayek

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and his intellectual kin, this one is angry, amoral, and impetuous, spurred by unavowed humiliation and thirst for revenge. The intensity of this energy is tremendous on its own, and also easily exploited by plutocrats, rightwing politicians, and tabloid media moguls whipping it up and keeping it stupid. It does not need to be addressed by policy producing its concrete betterment because it seeks mainly psychic anointment of its wounds. For this same reason it cannot be easily pacified—it is fueled mainly by rancor and unavowed nihilistic despair. It cannot be appealed to by reason, facts, or sustained argu- ment because it does not want to know, and it is unmotivated by consistency or depth in its values or by belief in truth. . . . Having nothing to lose, its nihilism does not simply negate but is festive and even apocalyptic. . . . It probably cannot be reached or transformed yet also has no endgame. (Brown 2018a: 75) As if to illustrate the zigzagging, reactionary, contradictory, and opportunist course of neoliberalizing politics and late neoliberal statecraft, the specifically “local” precursors to the conjoined moment defined by the Donald Trump election and the Brexit referendum included the protracted failure, both in design and delivery, of third-way style of “progressive” neoliberalism on each side of the Atlantic (see Fraser 2017; Hendrikse 2018; Mudge 2018). For some time, cracks had been clearly evident in this, the supposed “best shell” for the neoliberal project. The centrist compact has since been shat- tered, and it may not be possible to put it back together again. All along, across these and other sites, neoliberalism has been (re)con- stituted by the joint action of reactionary and generative currents, both by the rollback politics of deregulation and dismantlement and by the rollout politics of procorporate and market-conforming governance. While these might be thought of, from a heuristic perspective, as criteria for a simple periodization—the “phase” of rollout neoliberalism in a sense being predicated, if not necessitated, by the limitations, contradictions, and outright failures of those experiments in selective state withdrawal, deregulation, and privatization that preceded it—these two faces of neoliberalization are more properly understood as dialectically intertwined moments of ongoing regulatory transformation. They speak to the lurching and nonlinear (and yet still identifiably frontal) course of neoliberal programs and projects, and to their proclivity for “failing forward” into improvised institutional solutions typically sought and found within a politically and fiscally narrowed solution space (Peck 2010). To the extent that the present, hard-shell moment of authoritarianism, austerity, and angry backlash represents something truly different to (and

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distinctive from) the previous moments of deregulatory rollback, when the principal targets for neoliberal politics were the vestiges of various social-democratic, developmental, state-socialist, and Keynesian states, then it has all the appearances of a “rollover” phase delivered more by force of uni- lateral action than through democratic consent. Correspondingly, if the intervening rollout phase—neoliberalism’s own institution-building moment, pursued through the euphemistic language of partnership, good governance, and helping markets work—was partly about making and repro- ducing new subjectivities, rationalities, and governmentalities, not least in best-shell formulations of the third way, then the reactionary forces of the present conjuncture have been primarily arrayed against this inheritance, as the reactionary dynamic in neoliberal statecraft shifts from a series of strategic and situational responses to an antithetical or alien Other (e.g., against particular forms of social-democratic, developmental, or socialist states) to various forms of plundering and cannibalization, as red-line or hard-shell defenses are erected around a recalibrated set of neoliberal priorities and privileges, once again pushing the burdens of risk and restructuring onto marginalized others. To the extent that this pattern holds—from one his- toric configuration, defined by the hollowing out of various manifestations of the social state, to another, based on the hollowing out of neoliberal governance itself—then it may point in directions that ultimately exceed the terrain of the neoliberal. As Brown (2018a) has captured this uniquely nihilistic moment, the revelation of neoliberalism’s last act could be that there simply is no endgame, no destination. What may be called for here, as Tooze (2018) has suggested, are new histories of the neoliberal present that are attuned rather less to the project’s own delusions of market freedom—without gainsaying, that is, how powerfully constitutive these “strong discourses” may have been in the past (cf. Bourdieu 1998)—and more to the prosaic practices of actually existing (late) neoliberalism. Such an

anti-Hayekian history of neoliberalism would be one that refuses neoliberalism’s deliberately elevated level of discourse and addresses itself instead to what neoliberalism’s airy talk of orders and constitutions seeks to obscure: namely, the engines both large and small through which social and economic reality is constantly made and remade, its tools of power and knowledge ranging from cost-of-living indicators to carbon budgets, diesel emission tests and school eval- uations. It is here that we meet real, actually existing neoliberalism—and may perhaps hope to counter it. (Tooze 2018: 136)

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It is important to recognize that what Hayek (quoted in Peck 2010: 18) once referred to as the “flexible credo” of neoliberalism has been realized through a somewhat improvised, often experimental, and shape-shifting repertoire of procorporate, promarket programs, projects, and power plays. As an adaptive rationale for ongoing projects of state and societal restructuring, fortified and guided by the strong discourse of market progress, neoliberalism objectively cannot exist in the world in “pure,” uncut, or unmediated form. Rather, its actually existing manifestations are (and indeed can only be) partial, polycen- tric, and plural; its dynamics of frontal advance and flawed reproduction are marked by friction, contradiction, and endemically uneven geographical development, volatile hybridity being its condition of existence. Hence the role of processual understandings of neoliberalization—since neoliberalism cannot and will not be still—coupled with a recognition of the necessary diver- sity of its actually existing forms. All of this implies that the long-awaited arrival of “postneoliberalism,” whatever its variegated shape, will surely not be a single event, or globally synchronized threshold moment, but rather an extended and geographically uneven interregnum, marked by atrophying consensus, regulatory ruptures, crisis-assisted transformations, social con- flicts, squalid compromises, reactionary opportunism, and the unruly emergence of actually existing alternatives from across the political spectrum.

Conclusion: Authoritarian (Re)turns The 2008 Wall Street crash triggered not only a breakdown of the financial operating system of globalizing capitalism but also a deepening legitimation crisis for neoliberalism. Across the advanced capitalist economies, rising unemployment and spiraling household debt served to further generalize conditions of socioeconomic insecurity, the untidy culmination of decades of late neoliberal maneuvering to extend market rules and corporate free- doms while systematically dismantling institutional safety nets and other social protections. The crash vividly exposed fault lines, stress points, and sites of abandonment across the geographically uneven landscapes made and remade by neoliberal globalization, which would prove to be fertile ground for the spread of reactionary populisms. On the basis of nostalgic appeals to socioeconomic and cultural securities now lost and to the sanctity of nationhood (the defense of which, even when sidestepping explicitly racist and nativist appeals, more often than not carried these undertones), emergent right-wing populisms have mobilized and weaponized all manner of grievances, real and imagined. A resurgent politics of social scapegoating

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and reactionary violence has once again targeted cultural, sexual, racial, eth- nic, and religious “others,” tagged as the undeserving beneficiaries of (progressive) social change and governmental indulgence. Fundamentally conservative, in seeking a selective and often revanchist restoration of traditional values and privileges, discourses of right-wing populism have become ever more deeply entangled with entrenched patterns of sociospatial polarization, such as to expose a widening political “cleavage between globalization’s win- ners and losers, with the latter often opposing its cultural dimension through xenophobic and anti-immigrant claims that converge in exclusive forms of nationalism” (della Porta 2017: 27). The question is how to interpret these developments in light of the fal- tering, but also dogged and apparently mutating, hegemony of neoliberal rule. Here, we have made a case against essentialist, economistic, or restric- tive readings of neoliberalization in order to call attention to the conjunctural formations that are the media of its reproduction, and which have shaped the terms of its complex coproduction with all sorts of regressive, progressive, technocratic, authoritarian, and reactionary currents. As Brown (2003: 2) noted some time ago, neoliberalism is, both in principle and in practice, “compatible with, and sometimes even productive of, authoritarian, despotic, paramilitaristic, and/or corrupt state forms and agents within civil society.” By reducing neoliberalism “to a bundle of economic policies with inadvertent political and social consequences,” she adds, analysts are liable to underesti- mate its role as a pervasive “political rationality that both organizes these policies and reaches beyond the market” (2). Mobilizing and yet at the same time reaching beyond the market has long been an ideological hallmark of neoliberalism, the recurring manifestations of which are never identical but resound in ways that are nevertheless unmistakable. Speaking to the Conser- vative Party Conference in 1975, on the eve of Britain’s neoliberal revolution, Thatcher articulated what for her were unbreakable bonds between neoliberalism’s economic agenda and struggles over the moral and political ground:

[As] serious as the economic challenge is, the political and moral challenge is just as grave, and perhaps more so. Economic problems never start with economics. They have deeper roots—in human nature and in politics. They don’t finish at economics either. . . . Those are the two great challenges of our time. The moral and political challenge, and the economic challenge. They have to be faced together—and we have to master them both. (Thatcher 1975) In their contemporary authoritarian forms, projects of neoliberal transformation seek to (re)establish viable conditions of rule, and distorted forms of

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popular consent, in part through accusations of state capture by progressive social forces, “takers,” and their elite sympathizers. In the United States, for example, such arguments have long been embedded in “a field of discourses in which the interpellations of one summon up and condense a series of others” (Hall 1988: 144). These are fundamentally moral discourses that mobi- lize potent imageries of good and evil, and they can be seen in a range of conservative protestations, including those against “illegal” immigration, the breakdown of traditional family values, and cross-cultural incursions into the sanctified spaces of national identity. Today, in the United States, those prom- ising to drain the governmental swamp have assumed occupancy of that swamp, hackneyed but tenacious critiques of state corruption and incompe- tence tend to become perversely self-confirming, the metastasizing face of postdemocratic antistatism, fostering alienation, indifference, exclusion, and diminished expectations. As Trump’s theater of the absurd captures the headlines, the business-as-usual work of corporate deregulation, environmental plunder, regressive redistribution, privatization, and dispossession continues in unabated, if not accelerated, form. The wry observation made by conservative strategist Grover Norquist in the early days of the Trump administration, and before these conditions became numbingly normalized, still seems to be holding true: “The press and a lot of observers in Washing- ton DC like to stop and look at a car accident and they miss that the traffic is continuing to drive past at 50mph. Things are moving forward, largely on track” (quoted in Smith and Jacobs 2017). Similar processes are underway in Europe, where fears of a demonized Other have been recklessly stoked by authoritarian populists and their enablers and allies. Reactionary social movements have been reawakened and emboldened, in some places riding their roiled electoral bases into political office. Returning to the question of the ongoing hegemony of neoliberalism, the reemergence of authoritarian impulses (and the credence these are given in mainstream debates) once again underscores the fact that, in the absence of a counterhegemonic Left politics that can serve as a viable alternative and counterweight to the voices of resentment and reaction, “the maelstrom of capitalist ‘development’ can only generate liberal forces and authoritarian counter-forces, bound together in a perverse symbiosis” (Fraser 2017: 47). Neoliberalism’s authoritarian (re)turn has been marked by the wholesale rejection of political compromise, concession, and consensus as means of managing dissent, while those holding on to power instead seek to make a virtue of ever more strident defenses of an idealized status quo ante, based

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on unabashed acts of appropriation and dispossession coupled with the intensified exclusion and domination of subordinate social groups (Bruff 2014). While neoliberalism’s last act has been predicted far too many times over the years, what can at least be said of this moment of actually existing nihilism is that the project seems increasingly to have given up on its own future, as the horizons of even nominally free-market action and imagina- tion seem to be collapsing. The very emptiness of these futures represents an important difference between the current conjuncture of late neoliberal authoritarianism and its predecessors from the 1970s and 1980s, the time when empty promises of a better, freer, and more prosperous future had yet to be historically tested. For all the recurring routines, however, this history cannot be repeated. And so even as reawakened, hard-shell forms of authoritarian neoliberalism continue to outnumber and outflank, not to say actively repress, so much of the repertoire of actually existing alternatives in the often-stultifying present, they can exert no such control over the social imag- ination. These battles over the future will have to be waged on the terrain of the present, of course, although there are reasons to think that they might ultimately favor those possessed of visions that are more sustainable, in all senses of the word—if the politics of no alternatives is indeed showing signs of running its course.

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