Neoliberals coined and repurposed consumer sovereignty to rival national sovereignty
Evidence
What did the neoliberals pose against the nation? Not only the world economy but the individual. In 1931 LSE economist William H. Hutt coined the term “consumer sovereignty.” Hayek adopted the term in 1935, and Bonn used it in 1933. For Hutt it was a solution to the demands of national sovereignty. As the term implied, it was not the nation-state represented by legislatures that was sovereign but the individual within it. Hayek wrote that socialists, who allocated resources from above, were demanding the “abrogation of the sovereignty of the consumer.” He followed his Austrian predecessor Carl Menger by seeing the true creative force in the economy as those who either accept or reject a price, and by rejecting a price, produce a new one. At a time when nation-states were claiming more and more of something called “sovereignty,” Hayek pickpocketed the term and reassigned it from the nation to the individual consumer. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 401
Categorization
- DEFINE: Explains the coinage and intellectual genealogy of ‘consumer sovereignty’ from Hutt through Hayek and Menger.
- XREF: Connects to the broader historiography of sovereignty’s redefinition in the twentieth century and to the reader’s core thesis of insulating markets from democracy. — connects to: Neoliberalism emerged partly as a critique of national sovereignty and democratic budgeting. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 399; Neoliberalism claims to liberate while actually eroding political sovereignty — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 211; Early neoliberals sought to radically shrink national sovereignty in service of free trade. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 440 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism claims to liberate while actually eroding political sovereignty
#expands(0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 211