Digital Mind 🧠

đŸȘ” The Threshold

Market competition was framed by neoliberals as guarantor of rights and peace

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, seed, causal_relationships, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@whyte_morals_2019, loc. 36

4 min read

Market competition was framed by neoliberals as guarantor of rights and peace

Evidence

Unlike Hirschman, I argue that a version of this justification of capitalism was central to neoliberal thought in the inauspicious circumstances of the twentieth century. For Hayek, who described his own project as doing ‘for the twentieth century what Montesquieu had done for the eighteenth’, and for his neoliberal colleagues, the challenge was to revive the argument that a society coordinated through the competitive market would replace the coercion, conquest and conflict endemic to politics with voluntary, mutually beneficial, harmonious social relations. The tendency to view neoliberalism as the dominance of the economy over all other spheres of life has obscured its distinctive political argument for the competitive market. Throughout the twentieth century, neoliberals argued that the demise of market competition was a threat to individual freedom that augured the rule of a coercive, bureaucratic power. They faulted socialism and social democracy for politicising distribution and replacing consensual market relations between individuals with violent sectional conflicts over ends. In the wars of the twentieth century, they saw the inevitable result of a turn away from the market economy. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 34 (#expands, via linked claim)

Röpke, who was in the audience during Robbin’s lecture and enjoyed it ‘tremendously’, borrowed terms from Roman law to define this vision of liberal peace. A liberal economy, he argued, separates imperium from dominium, ownership from sovereignty, and therefore prevents conflicts over resources. Referring back to the liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith, he described the (old) liberal principle as that of the ‘thorough separation between the spheres of the government and of economy, between sovereignty and the apparatus which provides material goods, between the Imperium and the Dominium, between the political power and the economic power’. It was a central article of faith for the neoliberal thinkers that a state that rules an area rich in natural resources does not own those materials, which are owned by private individuals who may enter into mutually beneficial relations for their sale. Multilateral relations of trade allow industrial nations to obtain raw materials by running their export chains through several countries, neutralising state borders and making the political rule of regions rich in resources unnecessary, Röpke argued. The goal, as Quinn Slobodian puts it in his striking account of neoliberal ‘globalism’, was a liberal world in which ‘nobody would mistake the lines on the map for meaningful marks in the world of dominium’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 258 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights
, 40; Petersmann tied the globalization of human rights to WTO-enforced open markets — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights
, 57; Neoliberals pathologised political struggle by framing the market as peaceful and politics as violent — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights
, 64 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

✉

Backlinks