There are some juicy quotes from Hayek in Shaviro’s piece. The market, Hayek wrote, subjects “man” [sic] to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” We are “force[d] to be free”, according to Hayek.

Shaviro’s is the sort of critique of neo-liberalism Kevin Rudd would never write.

It makes clear the deep continuity between the project of neo-liberals such as Hayek and the Enlightenment urge to control and discipline – to remake new humans who are ‘rational’, and thus ‘free’. It would be interesting to compare the sorts of dispositions and attitudes which underlie this logic of governmentality with those of Soviet Marxism.

The real question here is the one of our relation, as individuals, to the economy as a whole — or to the so-called “free market.” We are told that the market is made of individuals just like us. We are told that it consists in nothing more, and nothing less, than the summation of billions of decisions made by billions of autonomous individuals, each of us making choices for ourselves. And yet, we actually experience the market as a vast, ineluctable force. It feels like something entirely alien to us, over which we have no power, and from which there can be no appeal. This is why economic catastrophe is something invisible, impalpable: it affects every aspect of our lives, yet we are unable to “see” it in itself, to discern it as an actual force, behind its all-too-evident effects.

We bitch at the government all the time, because we can more or less see how it works, and because it gives us specific people to blame when something goes wrong. That is why so many Americans agreed with Ronald Reagan when he said that government was the problem — despite the fact that Reagan himself was the government. The market, in contrast, seems to be something that’s just there — like the weather, perhaps, or like an earthquake. We complain about the economy all the time, of course — but only in the way that we complain about a rainy day. Anything further would be a waste of breath — since we know that we cannot do anything about it. Americans get mad about having to pay taxes; but, even if they grumble, they basically accept the fatality of outrageously high interest rates on their credit cards. This is why there are no riots, and no street protests, in the United States today.

Indeed, the very purpose of the “free market” is to instill this kind of fatalism in people. The market is largely an instrument of discipline and control.

So I was happy to find this point rather elegantly made by the Canadian academic Leo Panitch:

First, let’s be clear about capitalism – and with it the character of the state under capitalism. There is a conventional assumption, a leftover of the cold war perhaps, that somehow capitalism is essentially about the market and socialism is essentially about the state. In fact, a central historical feature of the state in capitalist societies is the role it plays as guarantor of private property and, most importantly for the smooth running of the financial markets, that it will always honour its bonds – that is, its borrowing from the private banks.

Because of this guarantee – the promise to pay others back from taxation revenue in the future – government bonds, whether issued to finance war or to finance welfare, constitute the least risky form of lending. As such, it forms the foundation of financial markets’ role in sustaining the ability of capitalists generally to accumulate – to continue to invest and make profits. This centrality of the state for capitalist accumulation is most notable with respect to those dominant states, like the USA, whose bonds are the foundation on which all calculations of value in global capitalism are based; states that host and support the main centres of international financial markets, such as New York and the City of London.

Understanding the role of the state in a capitalist society helps us to see why, when a government bails them out with public money, the bankers do not see this as the start of socialism. On the contrary, they see it as the government fulfilling its duty to the financial markets – whose smooth running it both depends on and sustains, by providing the basis of confidence in the credibility of the banking system.

So it is misleading to see government involvement in the banks – whether it be the pure bailout of the original Paulson program in the US, or the subsequent non-controlling equities taken by the US, British and other governments – as per se a move away even from neoliberalism. (It is also misleading to see neoliberalism as being about the withdrawal of the state from the markets – and therefore this current involvement of the state as a defeat of neoliberalism. The state under neoliberalism has been very active in promoting the vast expansion of financial markets and facilitating their volatile growth; and, as this volatility inevitably led to repeated financial crises, in keeping the financial system going from moments of chaos to moments of chaos.)

From my (sociological) point of view, the shorter answer to the question is – no.

In fact, I think the way the question’s posed reflects a number of category mistakes. The first is to take the theoretical apparatus that accompanies various ideologies too seriously. As I’ve argued previously, ideologies are ensembles of political forces and political interests and their theoretical baggage is necessary for their reproduction but still contigent and able to be discarded or modified where circumstances dictate. Debating the finer points of “Austrian economics” might be an interesting diversion for those who might have been debating how many angels can dance on the point of a pin in Thomist times, but it’s a side show when it comes to political action. Phil BC at A Very Public Sociologist makes this point succinctly and elegantly:

Academics, armchair economists, libertarians and House Republicans are the only ones who take the “principles” of neoliberalism seriously. Governments here and across the Atlantic only stick with it in as far as it entrenches the rule of capital.

The second error is to assume that neoliberal governments are serious when they talk about shrinking the state. Again, I argued previously that the size of the state is governed by much longer term secular trends, which are less amenable to political management than often thought. Just as the “nationalisation” of banks in the UK and the TARP bailout in the US don’t represent some form of socialism because the state buys junk paper or takes over failing financial institutions, so too an increasing tax take and its redistribution don’t signal the presence of social democracy.

Historically, the equation of socialism with public ownership is an artefact very much of the British (and to a lesser degree the Australian) experience. The Swedish Social Democrats were never all that exercised by it, preferring to shape product and labour markets by other means. And the French dirigiste planners of the right were quite enamoured of public ownership, while German social and Christian democrats intervened at the level of the firm through entrenching co-determination in governance rather than through public ownership.

This brings me to the third mistake – the failure to ask the critical question – cui bono? Neoliberalism historically has been much more about benefiting finance capital at the expense of manufacturing capital (and disciplining labour) than about freedom from government intervention per se. Thatcher’s embrace of monetarism was a massive re-engineering by the state of the economy, forcing up unemployment (deliberately, as Norman Lamont admitted) to destroy manufacturing and coal mining and with them the power of organised labour.

The deep reservations expressed about the beneficiaries of the TARP bailout should make it crystal clear that the American state’s intervention is not directed by any sense that power should be shifted within the economic field as a whole. The power of the state is being employed in this instance to recapitalise financial markets, through a sort of reverse redistribution. Incidentally, the objection about moral hazard has some force here. It’s part of the “Washington consensus” which has only been applied to the finance and banking sectors in other nations – for instance Korea and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis. We can also see revealed in these events the myth of globalisation as some sort of process floating free of state strategies. Rather, globalised financial markets, and the consequences of their pathologies, are deeply imbricated with the stategies of the US state (and to a degree those of others – as in the G20).

The real significance of the credit crisis lies not in sounding a death knell for neoliberalism, but for what it can tell us about the decline in the power of the American state. That’s been touched on here before, and John Gray has something interesting to say about it in The Guardian.

Russia has already called the US’ bluff in geopolitical terms on Georgia. Now the sovereign owners of the US debt are getting restive. The American power elite is about to find out that debtors can’t continue to call the international tune indefinitely.

The next administration will be presiding over a deeply diminished United States after eight years of George W. Bush. The likelihood is that the TARP bailout won’t be the end of it. US taxpayers will be subsidising the ruins of American financial dominance for some time to come, and US economic and military power will have to come to terms with a more multipolar world. And if (as appears more likely recently) Barack Obama is elected, his ability to bring about any change will be severely constrained by the steps that have been taken in the last week.

One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.

If you look at things over the long term, there are a range of secular trends common to most developed states (and part of the problem with less developed states and the process of post-colonial state formation is that there’s a sort of recipe for what a state does that might be very difficult to replicate in the absence of the conditions of its possibility). The British liberal state of the 19th century managed to govern with a tiny civil service – departments of state such as the Exchequer used to employ only around 20 or 30 people as recently as the 1860s. The vast amount of state employees were in the military, with the post office a distant second. Government – to the degree that there was government – was devolved to largely amateur institutions, and government didn’t do very much. Historically, European states spent almost all their revenue on war and defence. From the late 19th century onwards, there has been a constant trend upwards – and outwards into civil society – but even the “advanced liberalism” of Lloyd George in his guise as a reforming Chancellor only had a footprint, if you like, of around 15% of GDP. It’s also important to underline the fact that much of the increase in state expenditure was driven from below – from a more active and more enfranchised citizenry.

The significance of the “crisis of governability” of the 1970s was the conclusion drawn that the public sector had reached its limits. At around the same time, democratic socialists in Britain – and Australia though we didn’t really have the debate here in the same terms – began to lose their sense of forward momentum and any sense of socialism as transformative. Thatcher, as I’ve suggested, in many instances strengthened the reach and power of the state – “big state conservatism” or liberalism is no new thing. It didn’t spring into being with Bush or Howard, as an examination of the records of Reagan and Fraser would indicate.

But nevertheless it does make sense to talk about neoliberalism. If it’s true that there are strong secular forces shaping the size and the state in a certain direction, it’s also true that attempts to reorient the scope and direction of the state’s activity are important, even if they don’t actually practice the anti-statism they preach. After all the construction of a market economy – embodying the precepts of possessive individualism – was not just a victory of certain social formations and their ruling ideas over others but also a project which required a massive expansion of the reach if not initially the size of the state – in order to overturn notions of a moral economy and to facilitate the transformation of both work in the direction of free labour and of factors of production as tradeable, among other things. It’s what Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation”. Much of the trend from the mid 19th century onwards was to further expand the state’s reach and scope through transferring activities in the economy from private to public governance. The last few decades have been about turning that around – in a way. But this has also required both a further expansion in the reach of the state and a self-imposed restraint which has proceeded under the sign of globalisation.

Incidentally, my argument elsewhere has been that globalisation is horribly confused as a social scientific concept – it tends to conflate far too many processes, suggest a unilinear direction where things are a lot more complex, and mistake effects for causes. But the mistaking of effects for causes – a characteristic of neoliberal globalisation talk (“there is no alternative”) – is itself deeply ideological. What is clustered under the name of globalisation does, and is intended by at least some actors, to do work in the world. In short, it’s an ideological rather than an analytical concept, and its force is such that it attains facticity.

It’s wrong to think of any political ideology either as a “coherent system of ideas” (the polsci 101 definition) or as only oriented towards the size of the state or the degree to which the state dominates “the commanding heights of the economy” or seeks to set market forces free. That’s partly because political ideas are often parasitic on and subsequent to forms of rule and techniques of governing, as it were, and partly because, sociologically, I don’t think you can make a meaningful distinction between the ideas and the institutions and individuals who are their “carriers” – as Max Weber would say.

Just as the state is better understood as an assemblage of institutions embedded within society and reflecting many of the conflicts and tensions within the social body than as some sort of monolith confronting “civil society”, so too ideologies are woven from a whole variety of cloths for a whole range of reasons. They’re as much about weird and misguided shadow boxing in the op/ed pages over the fetish of Hayek as about any abstract theoretical wonkery. There’s no “essence” of liberalism, or of socialism for that matter. Some ideologies have a closer articulation to reason – because they’re understood in terms of reason not necessarily because they are reasonable – than others. The search for a coherent doctrine of fascism or of conservatism always fails because these movements are basically ones of affect and emotion which are hostile to reason. But it’s as unreasonable to compare “Soviet Marxism” to some ethereally pure and ideal Marx, whose texts are incredibly complex and often contradictory. But let’s be fair here – there’s no “classical liberalism” either which is entirely amenable to rational redaction.

In many instances, what we’re doing when we talk about ideologies is textual analysis. Modern political philosophy is far more akin to textual criticism and hermeneutics than it sometimes thinks. It’s a technique of ordering texts – confused, complex and intriguing texts – and giving them a shape and a coherence they lack. It’s also an atemporal and ahistorical enterprise – acting as if liberalism is The Two Treatises on Civil Government or communism is Capital or the Grundrisse. In actuality, these texts are inseparable from their contexts, both historical and in terms of the work they are made to do as lodestars or fetishes of subsequent or concurrent practices. An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.

Ideologies, in short, are what ideologies do.

Ideology is also the will to govern, and how that will seeks to embody itself in steering the ship of state. It embodies a particular (ideal) relation between state and citizens.

It can be useful to use some of the ideas about and from ideologies and the arguments for political analysis, but only if we remember that at best what we’re talking about are ideal types. The world of politics is far far messier than any ideological prescription. As is policy.

Where we can reasonably argue that there is meaning in what we say is where we can identify a general orientation – and which forces have a sense of movement and momentum behind them. The big problem social democracy has is that it’s lost any sense that there is a coherent project. It’s lost any sense of working on the world to transform it.

Neoliberalism has both.

But neither has the coherence that their adherents – or many analysts – might think.

But what matters is that people think they do – it’s a truth effect in Foucault’s terms or a social fact in Durkheim’s. And there are still meaningful distinctions to be made – but they’re often to be found in the nature of the rhetoric and the framing of problems and the underlying assumptions rather than false propositions such as “if a state is bigger than x% of the economy it’s social democratic”. Most important are the effects ideologies create on thought and action, and people’s material circumstances, and in what they enable and what they constrain. All of those are somewhat artificial distinctions analytically, but they’re useful. What we should be looking at is how they frame that object called “society” and what principles they use to manipulate it and how they divide it up, how they create friends and enemies. It’s this sense in which concepts like “aspirationalism” and “social justice” – or “transparent information” – become imbued with both meaning and the capacity to be mobilised to do stuff.

And their ethical commitments are vital.

Elsewhere: Another segue from Jacques Chester at Troppo.

One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?

In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.

Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Partly, it’s as Davis says, a different time sense where one lives in “the eternal present of the market”, seeing the future as something amenable to both unpredictability and calculation. Partly it’s a belief that meaning is an individual affair, and that progress is the result of the aggregation of individual decisions through the mechanism of the market. Liberals are often highly suspicious of the idea that politics is about meanings, seeing this as the first step on the road to serfdom.

In actually existing Australian politics, of course, we’ve been beset by culture wars for a decade or more, where those taking up the sword in the “battle of ideas” have – despite some protestations to the contrary – been far more conservative than liberal. But, and here’s the rub for conservatism, with the decay of institutional authority and moral certainties of all kinds, all this results more and more in an articulation of a narrow sense of national belonging with the individual. Secular ceremonies such as Anzac Day aside, we’re supposed to be patriots only in the privacy of our own castle, as it were. Not too dissimilar to George W. Bush’s “beat the terrorists through spending money” thing.

So all the sound and fury of the “battle of ideas” aside, what’s left of the sense that “being Australian is an ethical project”? Our cultural history, Davis argues, is replete with a particular privilege given to fairness and egalitarianism (at least among those within the symbolic pale of Australianness), and what really is a social as much as a political democracy – a set of habits and attitudes as much as the institutional and policy architecture which sustained and gave voice to them. Is much left of this tradition? Should we be looking to ourselves rather than to the state or the Labor party or whoever to sustain them? These are questions if not raised then implied by his book which I think are well worth posing.