The 2008 crisis renewed asceticism while separating market faith from expert distrust

Evidence

Yet it can be suggested that some of these tensions have in fact been successfully contained by neoliberal politics all along. The aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 saw an amplification of the conservative ethics of individual responsibility, as well as a discourse of sacrifice and “tightening the belt,” which helped justify years of austerity politics (Konings 2018). According to this view, ordinary people did not so much involuntarily adopt the ascetic logic of austerity as willingly embrace it. Neoliberal reason thus bolstered (rather than undermined) a renewal of the Protestant ethic of “asceticism,” with paradoxically reverse effects on the legitimacy of experts (who were rejected for their duplicitous espousal of marketization policies) and that of markets (which were respected for their upfront, if unapologetic, pursuits of capital accumulation). Thus, even as experts, political elites, and publics entered into new conflicts around neoliberalism’s broken promises, markets and publics did not part ways. One explanation for this riddle is that traders and citizens alike were bound by the “auto-finality” of the Weberian capitalist spirit: the ability of economic and social agents alike to relate to their own futures in an autotelic way (Stimilli 2017). In other words, promises (fulfilled or unfulfilled) did not matter to them as much as “the pursuit” itself. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 75

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘auto-finality’ from Weber/Stimilli: agents relate to their futures autotelicly, prizing the pursuit over the promise.
• XREF: The split between rejected experts and respected markets prefigures financialized populism’s anti-technocratic voting central to the reader’s project.
• ADDENDUM: The willingly-embraced austerity point builds on ‘On Sacrifice’ but that article covered ritual death-sacrifice; this is economic promissory sacrifice.