Freedom after Neoliberalism

Over the last four decades, the rise of the socio-political formation widely referred to as neoliberalism has seen a particular model of freedom – the freedom of free markets, property rights, and entrepreneurial self-ownership – gain prominence in a variety of ways around the globe. More recently, there has been a surge in critical activity around neoliberalism, which has led to the emergence of an increasingly settled understanding of its political, economic, and cultural mechanics. Most critiques, however, have proven reluctant to engage neoliberalism on the territory that it has conspicuously made its own: namely, freedom. This special collection aims to rethink, re-evaluate, and renovate the many meanings of freedom beyond its limited economic function in neoliberal theory and practice, and to imagine what freedom might look like in a world beyond neoliberalism. The introduction provides an overview of the current conjuncture, in which there is a growing realisation that neoliberal governance has failed to deliver on its promises of freedom. We argue that this realisation has made possible, and necessary, the exploration of new histories and new futures of freedom. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of the articles that comprise this special collection.

If in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again. The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.
-F. A. Hayek People were in prison so that prices could be free.

-Eduardo Galeano
In 1973, which on many accounts represents the year zero of the neoliberal era, the American prison population reached its post-war low. At about 360,000 inmates in total, or roughly 100 convicts per 100,000 residents, the rate of imprisonment had been relatively stable for decades at what was increasingly being viewed by criminologists as its 'normal' social level (Wacquant, 2009: 115, 117). With this stability in mind, a 1973 report submitted to President Richard Nixon by a national criminal justice body recommended freezing prison construction for a decade. In addition to a spare capacity of beds, the report cited ' overwhelming evidence' that incarceration did not lead to reform or rehabilitation, 'that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it' (qtd in Wacquant, 2009: 113). Two years later, French sociologist Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) unveiled a historical narrative whereby the physical prison-which emerged in its modern form in the 17th century and whose social centrality was consolidated in the early 19th century-could now be considered the relic of a prior age. The prison had lost its preeminent purpose, according to Foucault (1977: 298), owing to the diffusion of modern forms of institutional control across ' all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society'. Over the latter half of the 1970s, in a series of lecture courses that would not be published until long after his death, Foucault (2008: 27) went on to revise and supplement this disciplinary narrative, constructing a history of 'the liberal art of government' focused around the concept of freedom. In an unusual step for him, Foucault brought this history explicitly up to date, devoting his lectures in the Spring of 1979 to the work of 'neo-liberal' thinkers in Europe and America in the period since World War II. It was in the ideas of these figures that Foucault located the outline of a postdisciplinary society. Neoliberalism would represent a governmental order in which the mechanisms of the market replaced the controlling apparatus of the state, and in which ' action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players … in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals' (Foucault, 2008: 260).
Foucault's intellectual dalliance with neoliberal ideas-was he, wasn't he, a neoliberal sympathiser?-has been the subject of much recent scholarly fascination (Mirowski, 2013;Dean, 2014;Zamora and Behrent, 2016). Far less attention has been paid, however, to the fact that Foucault's overarching story about the intertwining fates of the prison, the disciplinary state, and freedom in late modernity-written avowedly as a 'history of the present' (Foucault, 1977: 31)-turned out to be quite misleading in its implications for his time and our own. Indeed, at the very moment Discipline and Punish appeared, incarceration rates in the United States shifted abruptly onto a steep upward curve. By 2000, the prison population had increased fivefold to almost two million inmates, many of them held in ' conditions of overpopulation that defy understanding' (Wacquant, 2009: xv). The correctional industry had become the thirdlargest employer in a country that otherwise saw social expenditure slashed. Under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, welfare was transformed into 'workfare', the obligation for unemployed citizens to accept any job offered to them, no matter how demeaning, underpaid, or unskilled. For the penal theorist Loïc Wacquant (2009: 292), the closing decades of the 20th century witnessed nothing less than a wholesale transformation in the ideology and practice of welfare and 'prisonfare': The operant purpose of welfare has shifted from passive 'people processing' to active 'people changing' … while the prison has traveled in the other direction, from aiming to reform inmates (under the philosophy of rehabilitation, hegemonic from the 1920s to the mid-1970s) to merely warehousing them (as the function of punishment was downgraded to retribution and neutralization). This retributive turn, over a period during which crime itself was not increasing, should be seen as part of a coherent governing philosophy, a 'new politics and policy of poverty' (Wacquant, 2009: 287). In the American context, this constituted a politics of racial and class warfare, since it was precisely those lower-class citizens (mostly black and Latino) who had formerly been on welfare rolls who were now being sent to prison instead. 1 The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once famously remarked that ' economics are the method: the object is to change the heart and soul' (Thatcher, 1981: n. pag.). In the US, Britain, and many other societies in the Global North, those hearts and souls that could not be changed by neoliberalism's economic methods were, it seems, made unfree by its punitive ones. 2 Meanwhile, in the Global South, neoliberalism and unfreedom were even more deeply intertwined in practice. As Naomi Klein outlines in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine, the imposition of neoliberal 'reforms' in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa came about not through the decisions of free democracies, but through the actions of dictatorships, nondemocratic governments, and international non-governmental organisations-the IMF, the World Bank-all underpinned by ' a powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians' (Klein, 2009: 15  In Hayek's view, not only was the free market the great economic and political achievement of the 19th century, it was also the most advanced epistemological system available to humans. The price mechanism, he argued, combined the knowledge of countless individual minds into a spontaneous, organic, and efficient system of resource allocation. If we understand economic freedom to be the principal mode of individual freedom, then the free market constitutes the only bulwark against the neo-feudalist threat of contemporary 'planning'. 5 Even with the best intentions, planning must lead to the concentration of power in few hands and eventually to totalitarianism, a process Hayek (2007: 57) claimed to have witnessed in his native Austria and was now observing again in Britain and elsewhere. 'So long as property is divided among many owners ', Hayek (2007: 136) contended, 'none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people-nobody is tied to any one property owner except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else'. This formal freedom from coercion-the ability, at least in theory, to escape from ties to any instance of hierarchical power-clearly trumped in Hayek's view the importance of freedom from want. 'The fact that the opportunities open to the poor in a competitive society are much more restricted than those open to the rich', he averred in one of The Road to Serfdom's most telling formulations, ' does not make it less true that in such a society the poor are much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society' (Hayek, 2007: 135). 6 Of Hayek's influence on the present character of neoliberal society, one recent journalistic account has remarked that '[w]e live in a paradise built by his Big Idea' (Metcalf, 2017: n. pag.). But how has this 'paradise' been brought to bear? How has want-that is, a life driven by the ongoing necessity of meeting basic material needs-come to be positioned not as a form of bondage but as an index of freedom?
One way to answer these questions is to point to structural transformations in the capitalist economy-and policy responses to those transformations-underpinning the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist order, an order organised around flexible entrepreneurialism and financial responsibilisation. Melinda Cooper (2017: 21) has argued that the response of the neoliberal right in the US to the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s 'was not a return to the Fordist family wage (that particular nostalgia would be a hallmark of the left), but rather the strategic reinvention of a much older, poorlaw tradition of private family responsibility, using the combined instruments of 6 Hayek's vision of freedom as non-coercion can also usefully be contrasted with the republican conception of freedom as non-domination, as influentially theorised by Philip Pettit. For the classical liberal, it is only direct interference in the basic choices of a person that can deny them freedom, and thus any imbalance in power or wealth between contracting parties does not impinge on the freedom enjoyed by each party. For the classical republican, by contrast, a person who is subject privately to a master, or publicly to an arbitrary power-'say, the despotism of a prince or party; or the colonial rule of an imperial power'-is considered unfree, regardless of how much or little interference that person encounters in practice (Pettit, 2016: 7). Domination can also be established through want: Pettit arguing that for the losers in a competitive market society, their inequality is easier to accept 'if it is due to impersonal forces than when it is due to design' (Hayek, 2007: 137). For more on Hayek's conception of freedom, and its relationship to his epistemology of the market, see Paul (1980). welfare reform, changes to taxation, and monetary policy'. The effect of these policy shifts has been to entangle the contemporary subject with capitalist financialisation in a way that ultimately undermines the very freedom in whose name these policies have been adopted. David Graeber ( in theory, really quite minimal, in practice it was sufficiently diffuse and pragmatic as to be capable of neutralising and even arrogating movements that had the potential to challenge it. From our historical vantage point, it seems clear that neoliberalism has, in Adam Tooze's (2018: n. pag.) words, repressed 'the impulse to know, the will to intervene, the freedom to choose not privately but as a political body'.
From here it is a short step to Harvey's more brazen contention that the retreat from a class-based politics was ultimately the handmaiden of neoliberalisation. Yet it should be noted that he is emphatic in arguing that it is pointless to 'wax nostalgic for some lost golden age when some fictional category like "the proletariat" was in motion'; the conditions of class formation are-just as they always have been-'full of the complexities that arise out of race, gender, and ethnic distinctions that are closely interwoven with class identities' (Harvey, 2005: 202). Efforts to distinguish between what Harvey calls mid-century ' embedded liberalism' and late-century neoliberalism have sometimes prompted unwarranted nostalgia for an earlier brand of capitalism whose benefits were more evenly spread, but in which basic inequalities (not least on a global level) still existed as a motor of the system. 9 But, just as the route towards a renewed social solidarity will not be identified by pining for the lost stability of the Fordist family unit, so it will not arise through the straightforward renunciation of identity politics counselled by some commentators (Lilla, 2017;Luce, 2017). Instead, this special collection claims, it is more likely to emerge from a project that seeks to reimagine freedom in new and rich ways.
With this in mind, and given that appeals to freedom have been far from uncommon in the history of left, left-liberal, and progressive thought, the circumspect, provisional, and even suspicious way in which the left has engaged with the concept of freedom over recent years and even decades becomes notable and disappointing.  and potentially much more destabilising phenomenon, in which the key mechanism by which capitalism had managed to justify itself for decades-its association with democratic forms of freedom-appears to have been exhausted.
To shift the focus away from economic management and towards legitimation in revisited his earlier work on governing through freedom only to end his paper by arguing that the most important concept for the contemporary moment is not 'freedom' but 'security'. 14 In making the case for the continued significance of freedom, we therefore find ourselves-rather unusually-positioned against a highprofile contributor to the very project we ourselves have established. Yet we remain convinced-and this collection takes as its point of departure-that reconsidering and re-evaluating the meaning of freedom in a contemporary setting can provide a way not only to explore, in Rose's (2017: 318, 319) words, the 'new rationalities' of the present, but also to locate 'their potential for progressive re-articulation'.
Before moving to describe the essays in this special collection that seek to reconsider and re-evaluate the meaning of freedom, it is important to clarify that we are not arguing that the present era exists ' after' neoliberalism in any clear temporal sense. Rather, the essays included here constitute acts of historical imagination, conducted in the main through the study of recent literary texts that themselves stage imaginative projects in which the idea of an ' after' is engaged-sometimes negatively, sometimes positively-while proceeding from the recognition of contemporary neoliberal conditions. Rather than attempt to summarise what this ' after' signifies, then, we leave it to the individual essays to make their own arguments via their own aesthetic engagements.
But this aesthetic element may also need some explanation: why should we look to literature (or to cognate aesthetic fields) in order to imagine freedom after neoliberalism? We have already acknowledged that culture is one of the means by which neoliberalism established its ' empire of freedom', so it stands to reason that cultural texts-including literature, film, and even popular examples of 'theory'-played a significant role in this process. There has long existed a body of critical material that positions 'the cultural turn' in the humanities and social sciences as a left-neoliberal canard which substituted a depoliticised identitarianism 14 The conference-which emerged from a project run by the co-editors of this special collection between 2015 and 2017-was organised by three PhD students at the University of York, Adam Bristow-Smith, Harriet Neal, and Joe Rollins. Details of the conference and the wider project are available at: freedomafterneoliberalism.wordpress.com.
for substantive ideological disagreement (Badiou, 2001;Michaels, 2004). More recently, some on the left have condemned ' cultural' Marxism as a profound historical error, sought to renounce its origins in the poststructuralist inheritance of phenomenology, and called for the development of an 'ultra-realism' in its stead (Hall and Winlow, 2015). Yet it is notable that, even where scepticism regarding the cultural turn is heard, literary studies and its cognate fields continue to produce some of the most robust and productive critiques of capitalism broadly and neoliberalism in particular. If, as Sarah Brouillette (2015: 5, 14) argues, literature of the neoliberal period has been complicit in valorising 'the reflexive individual's enterprising and expressive labor', it has also offered us 'more tangled forms of self-consciousness, far distant from any celebratory self-appreciation'. And if cultural production under neoliberalism has incubated the paradigmatic post-Fordist labourers of the ' creative class' (Florida, 2002), it is aesthetic criticism that has tended to offer the most subtle, sustained, and responsive critiques of not only the cultural products in question but also the economy from which they emerge. 15 Thus, over recent years, a growing body of scholarship has emerged that works to explore and establish the relationship(s) between neoliberalism and contemporary aesthetics. One aspect that unites this work is a concern about the validity and precision Larraín's film is another 21st-century historicisation that seeks to explain the way in which neoliberalism's relationship with freedom became attenuated as it established itself as a governing logic. But whereas for Peace this attenuation is total-never again will England enjoy liberty-Larraín's films identify a new opportunity to locate freedom in the logic of mimesis itself. In his reading of Larraín's more recent film how cosmopolitan thinking provides a site for reengaging the concept of freedom beyond its narrow understanding within neoliberal discourse.
The final articles in the collection set out more positive accounts of what freedom after neoliberalism might look and feel like. Although Ralph Clare is emphatic in arguing that we do not today live in a period after neoliberalism, he nonetheless uses the collection's title as an occasion to critique neoliberalism's ' cynical presentism [,] in which time seems to stand still and change seems impossible'. For Clare, the temporality hinted at by our title resonates with the temporality of Ben Lerner's 2014 novel 10:04, a text that offers an immanent critique of neoliberal time by emphasising the ways in which the everyday present, 'if properly attended to', functions as a reservoir of affective potentiality. The identification of such a form of potentiality, Clare argues, undermines the temporality of neoliberalism-most visible in the temporality of debt-wherein freedom is made equivalent to a future of dramatically limited options that, in reality, are so limited as to represent no freedom at all.
What is most promising about this critique is that, in order to locate freedom after neoliberalism, it suggests that it is not actually necessary to be '  (2016: 134) argues that '[n]eoliberalism has become incredible, but that is partly because it is a system that no longer seeks credibility in the way that hegemonies used to do, through a degree of cultural or normative consensus'. 'Freedom' was the term that underpinned the credibility and hegemony of neoliberalism in its ascendant phase. Our collection contends that it is high time to recapture this key idea as a resource for immanent critique and a route to a different future.