Neoliberals weaponized the household critique to discredit all politics

Evidence

A decade before Hayek, in 1958, Hannah Arendt had drawn on Myrdal to criticise the modern tendency to model ‘the people’ on the family and entrust their care to ‘a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping’. For both Myrdal and Arendt, the collective establishment of ends was necessarily political, and could not be determined on the despotic model of the household head. For Hayek and the neoliberals, in contrast, the critique of the household model served to discredit all politics and to privilege the market as resource-allocator. For them, there were only two options: the simple conditions in which ‘the father can supervise the entire economic management’, as Mises put it, or a system of monetary calculation and market prices in which decisions on the allocation of resources are removed entirely from political oversight. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 158

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s project on market ethics: shows how the same premise (rejection of household model) led Arendt to republican politics but Hayek to market supremacy — a divergence worth keeping. — connects to: Neoliberals have repeatedly appropriated left-wing ideas and twisted them to their own purposes. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 21; Neoliberals co-opt left critiques to discredit even market-based ethical consumption. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 411; Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 218 (+1 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how a shared intellectual inheritance (Greek oikos, Myrdal, Mill) split into anti- and pro-market camps — the contingency of the neoliberal ‘only two options’ framing.
• DEEPTHINKING: The forced-choice framing — father-supervision vs pure market prices — is a dense epistemic move worth sitting with: it constructs any middle political-economic arrangement as incoherent by definitional fiat.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 218
• Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization #corroborates (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439