The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism - Softcover

Connolly, William E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355841 ISBN 13: 9780822355847

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In The Fragility of Things, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books include A World of Becoming; Capitalism and Christianity, American Style; and Pluralism, all also published by Duke University Press. He is a former editor of Political Theory and a founder of the journal theory & event. His classic study The Terms of Political Discourse won the Benjamin Lippincott Award in 1999.

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THE FRAGILITY OF THINGS

self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism

By WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5584-7

Contents

prelude 1755..............................................................
1
CHAPTER 1 Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism......................
20
first interlude Melancholia and Us........................................
43
CHAPTER 2 Hayek, Neoliberalism, Freedom...................................
52
second interlude Modes of Self-Organization...............................
81
CHAPTER 3 Shock Therapy, Dramatization, and Practical Wisdom..............
98
third interlude Fullness and Vitality.....................................
140
CHAPTER 4 Process Philosophy and Planetary Politics.......................
149
postlude Role Experimentation and Democratic Activism.....................
179
acknowledgments............................................................
197
notes......................................................................
201
bibliography...............................................................
225
index......................................................................
233

CHAPTER 1

steps toward an ecology of late capitalism

Neoliberalism, let us say, is a socioeconomic philosophy embedded to varyingdegrees in Euro-American life. In its media presentations, it expressesinordinate confidence in the unique, self-regulating power of markets asit links the freedom of the individual to markets. At a lower decibel leveland high degree of intensity, it solicits modes of state, corporate, church,and media discipline to organize nature, state policy, workers, consumers,families, schools, investors, and international organizations to maintainconditions for unfettered markets and to clean up financial collapses, eco-messes,and regional conflicts created by that collusion.

Neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism are thus not exactly the samething, at least since neoliberalism displaced the latter in Euro-Americanthought between 1935 and 1960. Neoliberals, as Michel Foucault has shown,often do not think that markets are natural; they think markets are delicatemechanisms that require careful protection and nurturance by statesand other organizations. The state does not manage markets much directly,except through monetary policy, but it takes a very active role increating, maintaining, and protecting the preconditions of market self-regulation.The most ambitious supporters want the state to inject marketprocesses into new zones through judicial or legislative action, focusing onsuch areas as academic admissions, schools, prisons, health care, rail service,postal service, retirement, and private military organizations. Notehow such shifts will implicate more and more citizens in the vicissitudes ofnonstate, corporate practices, where the ability to discipline and channelconduct increases.

So neoliberalism solicits an active state to promote, protect, and expandmarket processes. And political leaders espousing neoliberal economicsthe most fervently—such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the twoBushes, and David Cameron—often turn out also to be bellicose defendersof conservative Christianity, moralism, and/or a specific image of the nation.Neoliberalism, a selectively active state, a conservative brand of Christianity,and a nation of regularized individuals surrounded by marginalizedminorities often complement one another, even if periodically they are atodds with one another.

What, then, are some of the political movements and modes of stateactivism supported by neoliberalism? They include, with varying degreesof support from different leaders, laws to restrain labor organization andrestrict consumer movements; corporate participation on school and universityboards; corporate ownership and control of the media; a jurisprudenceand court decisions that treat the corporation as a person with unlimitedrights to lobby and campaign; court policies that treat money as amode of speech to be protected by the state; demands for bankruptcy lawsthat favor corporations at the expense of those working for them; specialcorporate access to state officials to maintain inequality and restrain unemploymentbenefits; extensive discipline of the workforce; legal defense ofcorporate financial power to limit consumer information about the policiesthat affect them; the ear of state officials who regulate credit and the moneysupply; use of the state to enforce debt payments and foreclosures; hugemilitary, police, and prison assemblages to pursue imperial policies abroadand discipline the excluded and disaffected at home; meticulous street andinstitutional security arrangements to regulate those closed out of the neoliberalcalculus; huge state budgets to promote the established infrastructureof consumption in the domains of highway expenditure, the energygrid, health care, and housing codes; state cleanup of disasters created byunderregulated financial and corporate activity; and state or bureaucraticdelays to hold off action on global climate change.

The corporate, media, state, evangelical, and think-tank cheerleaders ofneoliberalism also deflect attention from ways state or neoliberal capitalismstrives to order workers, consumers, localities, and international institutionsto fit the neoliberal dictates of market behavior. It is an effective ideologicalstrategy and a destructive and dangerous organization of privateand public energies. The activist, neoliberal state becomes most transparentduring an emergency or meltdown, but it is always operative.

Perhaps the quickest way, then, to dramatize the difference between classicalmarket liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism is to say that theformer wanted the state to minimize interference with "natural" marketprocesses as it purported to leave other parts of civil society to their owndevices, while the latter campaigns to make the state, the media, schools,families, science, churches, unions, and the corporate estate be orderedaround neoliberal principles of being. This version of state activism providesa brand of statism that helps to draw together into one political assemblage,at least in America, differential priorities among neoliberals,evangelicals, neoconservatives, and the Vatican. There are others.

The Subjective Grip of Neoliberalism

Several angles of criticism have been brought against neoliberalism.Marxists focus on how its celebration of the market covers up exploitationand crisis tendencies internal to capitalism. Keynesians and Social Democratsfocus on how it overplays the self-regulating power of markets andunderplays the recurrent need of states to seed growth after a downturn,to provide unemployment support, and to spur consumer demand by atax system that dampens inequality. Liberal Christians, atheists, Muslims,and Jews berate its heartlessness and readiness to leave those on the bottomout in the cold. Maverick market theorists such as Fred Hirsch focuson how the combination of consumer sovereignty and unconscious marketprocesses regularly generate severe consumer binds, until it becomes moredifficult to make ends meet for people of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822355841
• ISBN 13: 9780822355847
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland