Dictatorship solved the neoliberal problem of replacing popular sovereignty with market sovereignty
Evidence
Contra Klein and Letelier, the neoliberals did not treat their technical economic agenda and the junta’s political repression as ‘entirely unrelated’. On the contrary, neoliberalism in Chile, as elsewhere, was always a political (or anti-political) project that found its normative justification in its claim to enhance the form of freedom that only a competitive market could provide. … Pinochet’s dictatorship offered a solution to a seemingly intractable neoliberal problem: how to replace popular sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market. It demonstrated what was necessary, in a context defined by strong collective politics and norms of solidarity, to induce subjects to abandon romanticism and the political contestation of ends, and adopt the morals of the market. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 330
Categorization
- XREF: Challenges the ‘Shock Doctrine’ framing; connects to the reader’s prior on Hayek and negative liberty where coercion may be ethically licensed. — connects to: The Treaty of Rome became a supranational constitution enforcing market rules beyond democratic reach — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 708; Neoliberal thinkers repeatedly countenanced dictators as the lesser evil — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 905; Neoliberal freedom amounts to submission to market sovereignty enforced by price fluctuations (+10 more)
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this ‘anti-political project’ claim square with the later neoliberal turn to ‘third way’ politics that embraced popular mandates?
Broader Connections
- Neoliberal order theorists saw authoritarian state coercion as protecting the market’s spontaneous order
#expands(0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 364 - Neoliberalism claims to liberate while actually eroding political sovereignty
#expands(0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 211 - Neoliberal market discipline was adopted to pacify unruly democratic publics
#corroborates(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 122