Crisis lets neoliberal officials arrogate sovereign power to define emergencies

Evidence

It is important to perceive that this middle-term response was the locus of the Schmittian moment of the neoliberal program. In normal times, none of these governmental entities would ever have had the authority or sovereignty to farm out massive government subsidies and waivers to other third-party private firms at the stroke of a pen: in a sense, the “privatization” of a financial rescue was more or less unthinkable. Indeed, Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke had been known to repeatedly deny that they had the statutory authority to do any number of things during the crisis. Yet, precisely here, in the midst of the collapse, these neoliberal leaders took upon themselves the right to arrogate the power of defining the “exception,” to anoint themselves as the true political sovereigns in time of emergency; and right at that juncture, they imposed the neoliberal prescription that creating more and different “markets” would serve to rescue the economy. Here lay the deep neoliberal provenance of the seeming potpourri of bailouts, rule suspensions, windfalls, forced mergers, and all the rest. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 945

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Schmitt’s concept of the exception as sovereignty — a theoretical grounding the reader may want to trace into other crisis literature (e.g., Agamben). — connects to: Neoliberalism was born in part as an emergency response to the 1938 crisis atmosphere. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 182; Neoliberal crisis responses deliberately undermine state fiscal authority — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 49; Emergency laws that suspend the rule of law are core to neoliberal governance — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 44 (+7 more)
• QUESTION: Does the author elsewhere develop the Schmittian/Economic Constitutional tradition within the thought collective — e.g., Ordoliberal roots?

Broader Connections

• Emergency laws that suspend the rule of law are core to neoliberal governance #corroborates (0.92) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 44
• Neoliberals exploit emergency exceptions to bypass democratic accountability. #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 980
• Crisis techniques turn manageable crises into calculated instruments of power #expands (0.85)
• A government can manufacture crisis to construct its own people as enemy #corroborates (0.82) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 111
• Mandate governance techniques directly influenced neoliberal attempts to discipline sovereignty #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 89
• Sovereign power manufactures the emergencies and enemies it claims to respond to. #corroborates (0.80) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 34
• Crises create exceptional possibilities by suspending normal rules of conduct. #expands (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 760