Badiou Rap

Over at Twitter a few good people have been attempting to get the tag #badiourap to be a trending topic, spitting their Badiou inspired rhymes into the Twitterverse. I encourage you to join in if you have a Twitter account and attempt to make this as big as it deserves to be.

A (Slightly Longer) History Of Neoliberalism

David Harvey’s book A Brief History Of Neoliberalism is the modern classic Marxist mid-range study of the emergence of neoliberalism as an attempt to reconsolidate class power lost after the brief WWII period of Keynesian embedded liberalism and progressive social democracy. The following is offered as a attempt to fill in the gaps that Harvey omits, critique a few elements of his work and provide notes on other fascinating literature in this field.

Geo/Philosophy

Blurb for the new Collapse has appeared, sounds really interesting.

Following Collapse V‘s inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus’ deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will pose the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy’s task to escape the planetary horizon, to abjure ‘everything that makes us scurry about blindly on the desolate surface of the earth’ (Badiou)?

Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws a direct line of correspondence between the spherical shape of the Earth as a planetary model for the horizon of thinking and the nature of transcendental idealism, so as to establish and determine the boundaries in which human thinking should and may occur – the spherical shape of the Earth as an unequivocal model for ‘the limits of all possible geography’. However, if Kant grants the Earth a direct determinative sovereignty in regard to thought, Nietzsche subverts the gravitational horizon of the Earth so as to bring about the possibility of the Great Politics and ‘Overman as the meaning of earth’. Thus Zarathustra begins his journey by exhorting to the people of the city, ‘Be faithful to the Earth’. Yet as his journey is prolonged, Zarathustra’s faith for the Earth turns into a longing for the ‘fresh air’, his will to remain faithful to the Earth is only nurtured by a ‘weightless affirmation’ of it. Schelling, on the other hand, thinks the earth as depth, inflecting Nietzsche’s weightless affirmation toward a profound, productive earth with a geological history: an earth turned inside-out, whose destiny is determined by its churning depths rather than by its surface inhabitants.

It is this enigmatic passage between the Earth as a geographical determination and the possibility of a weightless identification of the Earth that conditions Deleuze and Guattari’s discovery of a new ground for Geophilosophy – a philosophy that grasps thinking in relation to territory and earth.

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as an (or the) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract ‘world’ that is the condition for a ‘whole’ of thought?

Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions presents us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth – these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will bring together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of ‘planetary thought’.

What is interesting here is the level of reflexivity and self-critique of the Collapse wing of speculative realism. For example, the critics of speculative realism have noted that since science as a discourse is intimately related to capital that any critique of captialism that draws its resources from a form of philosophy strongly related to science will be perhaps problematic and that speculative realism is inherently apolitical, a position taken by some of it’s supporters as well as detractors. This volume appears to address these two concerns directly: the capitalist capture of science on one hand, and the political implications of geophilosophical thinking with regard to issues such as climate change on the other.

High In Offices We Stared Into The Turning Wheel Of Cities

Over at The Crystal World, my friend and teacher in the ways of Prog, Ed gives us all a very fine introduction to Rock In Opposition (hereafter RIO).

For me, other than producing incredible music, Rock In Opposition has always been intriguing to me politically, as one commentator notes, (negatively) “the “Rock in Opposition” festival was most likely led by anti-capitalist, left wing motives”. As I’ve already mentioned, Deleuze enjoyed a bit of French prog, turning up to eulogise the actions of 1968 on Heldon’s debut record, though they aren’t strictly RIO. Heldon’s Richard Pinhas has solid left credentials, having had a simultanous political and musical awakening at the baracades. I actually had a really interesting piece on the politics of French prog, but I  can’t find it now. It is because RIO is a genre of music, like branches of DIY punk, that sets itself specifically in opposition to the mainstream structures of the music industry, it’s distributive mechanisms and the commercially oriented restrictions placed on artistic endevour. As Ed notes the original RIO concert poster told us that you would be attending to listen to band “the record companies don’t want you to hear” – bands that could not be properly represented by the music industry (emphasis upon industry). Of course, they weren’t all political explicitely, Univers Zero report they fought with Henry Cow/Art Bears drummer Chris Culter on precisely this point – UZ seeing politics as meaningless. Indeed, Henry Cow indeed seem pivotal here, as they arranged the whole affair, formed in May ’68 no less, and displayed left-wing politics in their music throughout. Key is their 1975 record with an uncredited and also RIO band Slapp Happy, In Praise Of Learning. In the song, Living In The Heart Of The Beast, the revolutionary concepts are front and centre:

We were born to serve you all our bloody lives
labouring tongues we give rise to soft lies :
disguised metaphors that keep us in a vast inverted stillness
twice edged with fear.

Twilight signs decompose us

High in offices we stared into the turning wheel of cities
dense and ravelled close yet separate: planned to kill all encounter.
Intricate we saw your state at work its shapes
abstracted from all human intent. With our history’s fire
we shall harrow your signs.

Now is the time to begin to go forward – advance from despair,
the darkness of solitary men – who are chained in a market they
cannot control – in the name of a freedom that hangs like a pall
on our cities. And their towers of silence we shall destroy.

Now is the time to begin to determine directions, refuse to admit
the existence of destiny’s rule. We shall seize from all heroes and
merchants our labour, our lives, and our practice of history : this,
our choice, defines the truth of all that we do.

Seize on the words that oppose us with alien force; they’re enslaved
by the power of capital’s kings who reduce them to coinage and
hollow exchange in the struggle to hold us, they’re bitterly
outlasting… Time to sweep them down from power
- deeds renew words.

Dare to take sides in the fight for freedom that is common cause
let us all be as strong and as resolute. We’re in the midst of
a universe turning in turmoil; of classes and armies of thought
making war – their contradictions clash and echo through time.

Now all this does a good job of exposing the fact that, contrary to mainstream most rock historians, punk wasn’t a political answer to the apolitical strains of prog. Prog also could be political, both in music and in lyrics, and was not merely escapism from social reality. The Insitute points out that Stormy Six, another RIO band, were not adverse to penning a “profondo rosso” ditty (though not as hardcore as Area) or involving themselves with 1970s Italian militancy through music, by combining their  earlier protest lyrics with vastly more experimental settings. As my anarchist foil housemate of Rhizo-improvisers The Exploits Of Elaine points out, CAN always saw themselves as “never a normal rock group. CAN was an anarchist community.”, and that music, in his case free improvisation, is a way in which new spaces and forms of politics can be enacted. One could also point to famously anti-capitalist Canadians Godspeed You! Black Emperor (analysis), whose internal operations and label Constellation are concieved on collective grounds, and instead of promotional material are fond of sending journalists information about oppression and trace the links between the music industy and arms manufacturers as can be found in the sleeve notes for their album Yanqui U.X.O. All together now “I open up my wallet. And it’s full of blood”.

Whose factory, our factory! Whose world, our world!

In his summing up the recent anti-capitalist protests in London, Kpunk writes:

The climate change protest, meanwhile, is largely meaningless, since it is a protest that everyone can agree with, and therefore has no potential to generate political antagonism – who is in favour of climate change?

 

This seems to be untrue, and reveals, if I may be bold for a moment, a misunderstanding of the tactics, organisation and position of Climate Camp and the link they make between the issues of climate change and capitalism. But let us backtrack. The central point of the linked post as a whole seems to be that the turn-up-march-kettle-scuffle-home logic he finds in protests like those on April the 1st, that rely too much on the spectacle and too much on putting (vague) requests into the Big Other, are in the end politically ineffective. In contrast to this, the recent occupations of factories by workers have:

the potential to move beyond the model of protest towards some sort of direct action by workers which can create an effective antagonism over issues of ownership, control and property.

In a follow up post, kpunk clarifies that:

the occupation strategy has a potential to move beyond the logic of protest. Where protest by its very nature awaits recognition from a big Daddy Other that it, in an obvious Hegelian reversal, grants recognition to, the occupation can refuse recognition not only of the big Other, but also of the system of property that it represents.

Now, I cannot see how the current form of factory occupations moves beyond the logic of requests made to the Big Other, the logic of protest, that Kpunk identifies (without in any way wishing to diminish or belittle the vital struggle those involved are fighting on the ground). Indeed, if there is any form of protest that does not escape the logic of making demands of some Big Other, it is the factory occupations as they have occurred recently.

Trying To Reach You, Thom

Thanks to Jell for reminding me about this one.

A Sort Of Abyss

George Bataille on that Continental/Analytic split.

It so happened that I met A.J. Ayer last night, and our reciprocal interest kept us talking until about three in the morning. Merleau-Ponty and Ambrosino also took part. . . We finally fell to discussing the following very strange question. Ayer had uttered the very simple proposition: there was a sun before men existed. And he saw no reason to doubt it. Merleau-Ponty, Ambrosino, and I disagreed with this proposition, and Ambrosino said that the sun had certainly not existed before the world. I, for my part, do not see how one can say so. This proposition is such as to indicate the total meaninglessness that can be taken on by a rational statement. . . I should say that yesterday’s conversation produced an effect of shock. There exists between French and English philosophers a sort of abyss which we do not find between French and German philosophers.

Georges Bataille, “Un-knowing and Its Consequences,” October 36 (1986): 80.

More Correlationism anyone?

And A Speculative Realist New Year! A Series Of Thoughts

In the following series of posts I hope to talk a little about speculative realism and offer a few thoughts on places where it crosses paths with my interests. After this post I will consider two topics other topics. First, “Weird Aristotleanism”, concerning Graham Harman’s and perhaps Ray Brassier’s similarities to Aristotle, a thought I have been trying to articulate for a good while now – since for Aristotle and many pre-modern thinkers the mind is conformed to the object, not the object (con)formed by the mind. Maybe in this post there will be some dabbling into the murky waters of neuroscience with regard to Aristotle’s thoughts on habit (more on that in a second) and Alberto Toscano’s paper at the Eclectic Criticism conference. Most vitally I think, thirdly, how Philip Goodchild’s work Theology of Money has already thought through much of the proposed work of a anti-humanist alien capital centred xenoeconomics in ‘Xenoeconomics and The Theology of Money’.

What does the year ahead hold for speculative realism? What is intriguing about it as a philosophical thematic is that so much of the discussion, and good quality discussion (I could link many, many more), has occured online. As Robin Mackay has observed, though speculative realism’s central organ Collapse is emphatically a real paper publication, it could not survive without the internet in terms of both promotion and discussion. Although I am not much inclined to sing the praises of academic blogging, there is a conversation going on, a community emerging and something like a philosophical civil society forming. Sure some of the posts might be just a collection of jumbled thoughts, but often they are excellent provocations to thought, the modern equivalent of the genre of philosophical letter. Graham Harman is particularly enthused with these developments and rightly so, as combined with the more serious and lengthy work done by open access journals (including the forth-coming and exciting New Metaphysics book series), the papers simply floating around and publishing concepts such as re.press, we have a new way of doing academic philosophy emerging within the shell of the old. But one has to enquire: is there something percular to speculative realism that makes it quite uniquely internet worthy? I guess the most simple explanation is that those excited about it are very much internet savvy and this is an end to it. So, I think the next year will see not ongoing online discussions, as well as more formal academic attention (secondary literature? just how reactive are publishing houses?) as the mainstream journals begin to talk about speculative realism, but also perhaps the use of the improved online way in which speculative realism is discussed (ie one which is beyond the Theory wars), and the way the main authors interact with this, being copied by other philosophical thematics and perhaps even other discourses.

Inevitably others are likely also to enter the debate. At some point Žižek is going to get stuck into this, and I wondering on what side he will come in the debate, which seems natural considering he too has written on neuroscience at length (in The Parallax View) and his general interests in moments such as German idealism and in particular, Schelling (in The Invisible Remainder). And of course, the elephant in the room is the intervention of analytical philosophy, potentially diving, like Žižek, across from the philosophy of mind. I am told by the introduction to Nihil Unbound that the Warwick Department of Philosophy, where the Pli journal is published, and Ray Brassier wrote his doctrinal thesis was a place where the continental/analytic boundary failed – indeed, Brassier has written on Quine and Laruelle in his paper for Pli ‘ Behold the non-rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle’. But what would be more interesting, perhaps, is someone who considers themselves to be self-consciously in the analytic tradition and partisan about its importance (ie someone like Hans-Johann Glock who wrote What Is Analytical Philosophy? this year, good review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews as ever), give his views. This would be much more interesting than one type of critique that will probably occur: the post-metaphysical Derrida/Levinas et al types offering their views. T-minus not much time till Simon Critchley or Tezza Eagleton stick their oar in and maybe, just maybe, a few literary theory types get involved. I predict though, and this is the only prediction I will emphatically make, that before 2009 is out we may well see a polemic, aggressive but very bad review, which will probably emerge from the likes of MC Grayling or the Comment Is Free crowd. This said, a contra-speculative realism review by a gleeful side-of-bus-writing humanist might be slightly interesting.

And inevitably, we are soon going to see theologians begin thinking more about speculative realism, or at least reading its major works, which will create a very odd situation indeed. Here in Nottingham, already, myself, Michael (who is now at Dundee) and Anthony have been considering the output of speculative realist philosophers and awaited each issue of Collapse with excitement for a year and a half now, although I think that it would be fair to say that although inclined towards questions regarding religion and theology all three of us would be unlikely to take the label of theologian (or speculative realist for that matter). To my knowledge, Anthony wrote the first critique of Meillasoux/Brassier from the perspective of his on going invariant vitalism project, although I understand that he isn’t particular happy with it these days. Mike is writing something on Meillasoux’s philosophy of religion and his Future God concept which might turn up somewhere at some point. This post-graduate enthusiasm for all things speculative and realist in part encouraged John Milbank to take an interest in what they were doing, having already considered Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la finitude at some length in his essay in the Belief and Metaphysics conference volume entitled ‘Only Theology Saves Metaphysics: On The Modalities of Terror’. If there are going to be theologians thinking about speculative realism outside people already aware of it largely from the internet or directly from it’s work, they are going to be theologians introduced to it’s themes by Milbank.

As has already been noted, the yearly Theology and Postmodernism reading group/class with Milbank took up Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and Alberto Toscano’s The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (as well as William Desmond’s God and the Between) with Meilliasoux in the background. Intially there was going to be a panel on Speculative Realism and God at The Grandeur of Reason conference in Rome, featuring Iain Hamilton Grant, Meillassoux and François Laruelle, with Milbank responding, but this fell through for a variety of reasons. This was particularly unfortunate, as Meillassoux had even been provided with a Radical Orthodoxy reading list and it would have been vastly intruging to see a dialogue actually working in the opposite way from the normal unidirectional ‘theologian critiquing a philosopher who genuinely doesn’t give a damn about this critique’ – how many contemporary Deleuze inspired philosophers are at all concerned, for example, with Radical Orthodoxy’s lambasting of the univocity of being? The paper Milbank did give in Rome was an extended response to the fruits of this reading group, using Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit (convinently recently translated) to sketch the outlines of a fresh kind of metaphysical Aristoteleanism which in his view outflanks speculative realism. The paper was somewhat of a hyper-blast of argument that I can’t recall especially well, but the basic contention was that as Ravaisson had proposed habit as central to human beings and developed a contemporary metaphysics thereof, which could be dialogued in someway with the modification of the Aristotlean tradition in Christianity – Aristotle, as course,  in contemporary virtue ethics, proposes what might be called an ethics of habit, the habit of forming a good character. Again my memory is hazy, but I think the idea here was to counter Meillasoux’s absolute contingency with an idea of ‘habits of matter’ and Brassier’s idea of most materialism concludes in idealism (hence the decline of materialism in the name of matter) by offering a both/and solution of some kind of oscillation. This talk of habit via Aristotle intergrates into Milbank’s larger project of attempting to recover teleology in general. First and intially in ethics, see the chapter on virtue ethics, ‘Difference of Virtue, Virtue of Difference’ in Theology and Social Theory. Then in metaphysics, see his endorsement of Robert Spaemann’s Happiness and Benevolence as being a work where a virtue ethics spills into metaphysics and traditional teleology of nature. And, of course, in theology: Henri de Lubac’s ressourcement of Aquinas’ in Surnaturel where a natural desire for the supernatural is recovered in order to deny the concept of “pure nature” that is independent from its supernatural end, the idea of ‘pure nature’ being the cause of a plague of dualisms (natural/supernatural, grace/nature et al), the forcing the transcendent from the immanent (to touch at no point, the supernatural as just a superfluous ‘add on’ to an self-sufficient nature) and the ushering in a purely secular sphere of thought and attendent disciplines. After all, surely the whole of Milbank’s project is an attempt to do away with any discourse that claims a space of ‘pure nature’ without reference to its supernatural ends. Yet there is a conceptual problem here: all the discourses that attempt to create a space of ‘pure nature’ (sociology, economics, natural science et al) without reference to the divine and the discourse of theology seem to have done a particularly bad job of it, because, as in Theology and Social Theory, they are all premised upon theological foundations. As there has been, at least in thought, no thinking of pure nature anyway,  how can there have been detrimental results? Even thoughts not about the divine end, thoughts attempting to fashion thought of pure nature, turn out to be secretly concerned with theology. Incidentally, it was this emphasis on teleology that oddly combined the concerns of his paper with those of Stanley Hauerwas’ on the same panel, who are both clearly influenced by Macintyre in this regard. I digress – what at its core Milbank’s interest in speculative realism?

When Ray Brassier came to visit Nottingham and in discussion with Dustin McWherter at Rome a few thoughts on the matter were proffered. Obviously, one element is a polemic one – that Speculative Realism is another continental philosophy of radical immanence that Radical Orthodoxy should respond to, critique and perhaps show how they are secretly after that old time transcendence deep down (which seemed to be some of the point of his paper in Rome). But the other is given by Milbank’s response to Brassier. For him, Brassier had cleared the way for theologians to begin again discussing metaphysics in a very direct manner, and begin suggesting that Christian metaphysics offers a better account, and not spend endless time messing around in hermeneutics (he used Gadamer as an example), Derrida inspired philosophy and phenomenology (Brassier is very, very harsh on phenomenology as we all know). This was similar to his response to Dustin in Rome, where he said something along the lines of it being good now we can get down to the work of competing metaphysics, the age of non-metaphysics now absolutely concluded. Indeed, this is the thrust of his aforementioned essay in the Belief and Metaphysics volume: Meillassoux’s Après la finitude‘s identification of the correlationist character of post-Kantian philosophy clears the way for a return to metaphysics, which includes a return in Milbank’s view to theology, the only metaphysics for him. I quote:

Perhaps, in consequence, the overwhelming mood of twentieth-century philosophy was neither atheism nor religiosity but rather agnosticism. Indeed one could claim that it was just this agnosticism that distinguished it from nineteenth-century philosophy. This was exhibited in two ways: the one philosophical, the other religious in tone. Philosophically it was shown by what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’. For this perspective, the non-speculative idealist view that our thought is indeed about a world external to us is balanced by an equal stress that the only world we know is the world as it is known to us. (Of course there are many exceptions to this, but as a generalization it holds good.) The over-all tone of twentieth-century philosophy was Kantian in the sense that epistemology not ontology dominated, but an epistemology of a quasi-realist bent. Dogmatism about how the world is in itself was largely eschewed, but likewise eschewed was any hypostasization of human thinking-processes themselves.

Philosophical agnosticism names then the correlationist move where one cannot have a substantial metaphysics, which finds a parallel in religious agnosticism (and an antipathy towards how things actually are) which tends towards a (plural) fideism. Here Milbank is almost certainly thinking of Meillasoux’s statement that “We are trying to grasp the sense of the following paradox: the more thought arms itself against dogmatism, the more defenseless it becomes before fanaticism. Even as it forces metaphysical dogmatism to retreat, sceptico-fideism reinforces religious obscurantism” – that correlationism allows the sneaking of religion back in through the back door, in the form of something like Wittgenstein’s mystical unsaid, Heidegger’s Being waffle, to which we might add the phenomenological turn to religion and every manifestation of Derridology and almost all brands of postmodern emergent Christianity.

So, Milbank concludes the first section, the opinion that the lack of metaphysical speculation ends in the terror of fideism:

So one is left after all with a confirmation of the anti-metaphysical agnostic character of twentieth-century thought. But for the reasons we have seen, should not this idiom be questioned in the face of religious and neo-liberal violence – both the terror of pure faith and the terror of pure reason, whose collusional purity agnosticism helps to promote and preserve? Should not both its correlationism and its encouragement of plural fideism be called into question?

So, rather than the perhaps more familiar move where the end of metaphysics ushers in the return of the religious in some manner, this opened the door to the fanatics who can assert without reference to the ways things actually are, which can never be confirmed, since metaphysics is off limits.  What is interesting here is that for Radical Orthodoxy metaphysics is then the theological and philosophical equivilent of playing with fire: get it wrong, make a seemingly innocuous technical mistake that one thinks seems orthodox and end up paying for it (severely) for hundred of years (Scotus et al), yet avoid it all together and one gets equally terrible consequences. So, Radical Orthodoxy feels more able to talk to Speculative Realism as both can talk about metaphysics, both are on that similar playing field – which is absolutely weird, given that Speculative Realism is the polar opposite in stressing the odd and supremely counter-intuitive immanence – a Platonism in reverse of hyperchaos (etc.) against the supreme neoplatonic recovery. One can also detect a subterranian connection between a philosophy which stresses anti-anthropomorphism and a theology which has a similar stress with regard the lack of power of the human as such and the faltering knowledge of God obtainable (as well as the classic opposition to anthropomorphism as idolatry in theology), although one could rightly respond that no religion could ever be that unanthropomorphic, and Radical Orthodoxy does attempt very strongly to defend the human from the kind of scientific reduction the Churchland’s might give it.

Whatever the year holds for Speculative Realism it will interesting to note how this consideration by Radical Orthodoxy plays out in theological circles (or if theologians independently respond to it, of course), as Milbank’s Rome paper will be doubtless published in a forthcoming conference volume. Will it cause a huge spike in interest, as there was a ripple in Badiou uptake among theologians? After Milbank had given his paper, a certain Radical Orthodoxy mainstay said to me “now I am going to have to buy a heck of a lot of books”. So if nothing else, the (xeno)economics of speculative realism may be sustained!

The Grandeur of Treason: Religion, Markets and Neoliberalism, 2 of 2

Sliced and diced from my paper delivered at The Grandeur of Reason conference in Rome.

There is a tendency in some quarters to identify neoliberalism with the work neoclassical economics. This is historically and organisationally false.

Of course, neoclassical economics played a vital role in disseminating neoliberal ideas throughout university systems, in particular the role of the Chicago School of Law and Economics, the home of Milton Friedman and Frank Knight, cannot be understanded in developing a wholly free market ideology. Yet, significant elements of what might be called the ‘neoliberal thought collective’, centralised at the Mont Pelerin Society established in 1947, the assemblage of experts that were responsible for the spread of neoliberal ideas through a network of think tanks, newspapers and policy advisors, Hayek’s ‘dealers in second hand ideas’, were not neoclassical economist. Indeed, key figures and ideologues, Hayek and Von Mises were heirs to another tradition Austrian Economics that was drew from the works of Menger, who was emphatically not associated with the Marginalist Revolution and place their economics on an entirely different set of axioms concerned with uncertainity, subjectivism and the absence of a notion of equilibrium. Hayek spoke in direct opposition to economics that was defined by what he saw a ‘scientism’. William Ropke, defined himself as an ‘ordo liberal’, the differences between this position and the Chicago school of economics were the subject of Foucault’s recently published lectures. The differences are considerable but may be seen as ordo liberalism makes the social domain economic, imbuing it with a concept of entrepreneurship, while envisioning the intervention of the state as maintaining this economic domain by preventing capitalism from destroying itself in its tendency towards monopoly, whereas the Chicago School Of Economics believes the social to be merely a manifestation of the economic – indeed, pace Gary Becker’s work on Criminology or Robert B. Ekelund et al’s work on Christianity (where the Reformation breaks the  spiritual monopoly in the “religious marketplace” dominated by Catholicism*), all human society is governed by the same laws of reality as the economy – the state’s role is only to act like a corporation and ensure proliferation further markets. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberalism does not envision the entirely reduced role of the state to a classically laissez faire nightwatchman. Instead the state is there to provide the condition of the possibility of markets – market were not necessarily spontaneous or natural. There was considerable diversity of opinion within the ranks of The Mont Pelerin society – what united them in a ad hoc manner was the desire to resist the massing forces of socialism that they believed to exist in the recent turn to Keynesian economic policy and in the words of David Harvey, restore class power that had been diminished after World War II. The diversity was so strong that Von Mises walked out during one meeting calling the assembled neoliberals ‘socialists’.

Indeed, members of the Mont Pelerin Society were not even economists. Statistical analysis of the society’s records reveals that not only are 1,107 members of the Society from every continent and major economy on the globe, even though understandably the majority of them are centralised in universities, many of them are judges, journalists and business men, experts on law as well as history, and philosophers and theologians. Yet the influence of the ideas formulated in the Mont Pelerin society are easily disseminated from its links to think tanks – the society is linked directly to over a hundred of them worldwide.

One must be understand that though there is a Wittgensteinian family resemblance between various neoliberal reforms in various countries, as geographer Jamie Peck has recognised, among others, the arguments of neoliberalism are formulated differently and in ad hoc manner to accommodate the cultural contours of the country – taking on a local flavour, adapting to local conditions, as well as there being significant tensions between neoliberal theories and their action in “actually existing neoliberalism”. Hence theoretical analysis must also be accompanied by analysis of the implementation of these theories on the ground level. His opinion is worth quoting at length:

neoliberalism has many authors, many birthplaces. Its multiple lineages  intersect and   interact in ways that reveal a great deal about how this ‘free market’ project, from its begin  nings, was selectively transnational, somewhat plural and socially produced project – the   hybrid outcome of a protracted conversation between a series of (only partly complementary) ‘local’ protoneoliberalisms

In the face of this considerable diversity of opinion, as well as disagreement and reformation of the original politically liberal sources, and the jerry-built formulations on the ground, neoliberalism is perhaps best defined, in Alasdair Macintyre’s terms as a battle for the soul of liberalism, and a large scale and significantly reforming argument within the tradition of liberalism; a conscious attempt by pro-market liberals in the aftermath of the Keynesian consensus of World War II to remake liberalism for a new time. This is the work I hope to complete during my PHD, in analysing how the critiques of Macintyre and other theological voices apply to the significant modification of liberalism by the neoliberals.

*  To quote the linked description of The Marketplace of Christianity

The Protestant Reformation, the authors argue, can be seen as a successful penetration of a religious market dominated by a monopoly firm—the Catholic Church. The Ninety-five Theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg by Martin Luther raised the level of competition within Christianity to a breaking point. The Counter-Reformation, the Catholic reaction, continued the competitive process, which came to include “product differentiation” in the form of doctrinal and organizational innovation. Economic theory shows us how Christianity evolved to satisfy the changing demands of consumers—worshippers.

The Grandeur of Treason: Religion, Markets and Neoliberalism, 1 of 2

Sliced and diced from my paper delivered at The Grandeur of Reason conference in Rome.

Too often there is the tendency to identify the neoliberal present as a direct genealogical extension of the work of Adam Smith, drawing an almost unbroken line from The Wealth of Nations to the unfettered market advocacy of neoliberalism and its attendant neoclassical economics.  The intuition of this claim is correct: obviously the majority of free market orientated neoclassical economists look to Smith as a forebear and as a vital component of their worldview: Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ metaphor remains a central element of the rhetoric arsenal of a working economist, though an increasingly vague one, one that functions far more as a ploy or invocation than a technical point. Yet, downplaying the intervening figures or over emphasing their continuity with Smith misses the most significant paradigm shifts in economic science – the process of mathematicisation, professionalisation and formalisation which moved economics from a moral science of political economy to economics. This major shift in the modern economic imaginary occurred at around 1870, the so-called marginal revolution, and was characterised by a particular relationship to the natural sciences – the interventions of Stanley Jevons, Vilfredo Pareto, Leon Walras, Francis Edgeworth and Irving Fisher (hereafter the marginalists for ease) and others. These innovations, with some modification take us up to the present day along the broadly anglo-American neoclassical lineage.It is at this point that in the whiggish histories of economics that it is enthroned as the queen of the social sciences, capable of accuracy, precision and rigour, the time when the ‘grandeur’ of economic reason, its ability to carry more weight in a discussion, began. It is here, in the 1870s where neoclassical economics solidified a previously discursive and linguistic discourse into a psuedo-science where inviolable and quasi-physical economic ‘laws’ that were circumscribed in complex mathematical models, that could not be ignored anymore than the law of gravity. This rhetorical development is a powerful political device that allows one to claim superior empistemeological warrant, where a class of experts (economists, business managers et al) possess a certain expertise that is an entry condition to debate that is required before any other political decisions are made, a tactic that has been highly successful in the post 1970s debates regarding the place of markets in the proper ordering of society. For who would wish to form policy that ignored the economic ‘laws of gravity’.

Some economic historians do indeed stress the ‘fundamental continuity of classical and neoclassical economics’ in the words of Hollander. Alfred Marshall also argued for a similar position in his classic textbooks. Yet these historians write a ‘internal’ history of economics, where economics works by each theorist commentating upon those of their forebears and improving upon them in a vacuum divorced from the sociological, political and ‘external’ influences that led their theories to be formulated and accepted. Rather a better approach is an ‘externalist’ history, that stresses the influence of these factors and the interplay between what is going on in the external world and what is going on internal to economics. Writing a history ignoring these factors is myopic to say the least and ideological to be polemic. It would be like writing a history of theology without ever mentioning philosophy or writing a history of protestantism stating it was a purely theological move ignoring the political and personal forces behind Henry VIII’s acceptance of the reformation. The radically orthodox project could be defined as an attempt to write an ‘externalist’ history of each major discourse in European history  throughout modernity (science, economics, philosophy, political science) with particular focus on theological influences, though there is obvious a danger here that what begins as an ‘externalist’ history becomes an ‘internalist’ one where everything is folded into a particular parallel history of developments in another subject  (here theology) without reserve, with too little attention external and purely contingent forces or the possibility of bi-directional influencing (something Mirowski is particularly senstive to in his accounts of the mutual influencing of the natural and social sciences).

For the following ‘externalist’ history I am drawing on what is know as the ‘Hands-Mirowski’ thesis regarding the development of 20th century economics – most fully formulated in Philip Mirowski’s book More Heat Than Light: Economics and Social Physics: Physics as Nature’s Economics. For the sake of brevity in the truncated account I am about to present let me state his thesis up front: ‘there was a readily identifiable discontinuity in economic thought in the 1870s and 1880s which was the genesis of neoclassical theory; both its timing and intellectual content can be explained by parallel developments in physics in the mid-nineteeth century’. Or to put it more briefly, the early neoclassicist stole the equations from the mid-nineteeth century ‘proto-energetics’ and ‘made them their own by changing the labels on the variables and then trumpeted the triumph of a “scientific economics””. Energetic physics provided the guiding metaphor for the birth of neoclassical economics.

To believe there is not a break between the marginalists would be to go against their own writings. Both all the major players believed themselves to be making a decisive break with the economics of the past and their peers agreed. The group consistantly had to defend what was peculiar about their economics: the saturation of it with high level mathematics. And this was how the Marginalists saw themselves – self-indentifing as “mathematical theorists”. Most significantly, in comparison to these peers they debated they saw themselves as writing the first properly scientific economics. Doubtless, the claim that ones social scientific discovery is properly scientific is one that has been often made in the last 300 odd years, but what was interesting here is why they claimed it was scientific – because it was mathematical and in particular because it employed the mathematics of physics.

Without going directly into direct comparisons of the mid-19th century energetics equations at length, which Mirowski does, a representative survey of the opinions of the theorists themselves should display that they explicitly considered their work to copy the methodology of physics – in particular their two favourite elements of it, rational mechanics, in particular the action of levers at equilibrium, and celestial mechanics.
Leon Walras, regarded by Alfred Marshall as the greatest economist of all time writes that ‘the notion of value is to our science what that of energy is to mechanics’ and that ‘the pure theory economics is a science that resembles the physio-mathematical sciences in every respect’. In 1909, in part to counter the criticisms of physicists in the application of their science to society, Walras writes ‘Economique et Mechanique’ – as well as including all the standard equations, this states that his major work Elements of Pure Economics uses identical formulae to mechanics and then proceeds to scald physics for making their own concepts vague. Two letters from physicists before publication warned him that he did not actually use these equations correctly.

Jevons too makes the same comparison, his equation of exchange ‘does not differ in general character from those which are really treated in many branches of the physical sciences’. In his Principle of Science he constructs a hierachy – giving the example of the reduction of meterology to chemistry and ultimately to physics. So too may we do the same with society – making ‘a kind of physical astronomy’.
Of all the pioneers, Vilfredo Pareto makes the connection the most explicit – writing to Irving Fisher, another early neoclassicist that ‘People who know neither mathematics nor rational mechanics cannot understand the principle conception of my book’ and in another work that ‘The theory of economic science [through using metaphors and equations drawn from it] acquires the rigour of rational mechanics”. Finally, almost daring the reader to challenge the annexation of physics, Pareto writes “Let us go back to the equations which determine equilibrium. In seeing them somebody […] made an observation “These equations do not seem new to me, I know them well, they are old friends. They are the equations of rational mechanics […] mechanics can be studied leaving aside the concept of forces”’ saying that “In reality it does not matter”.
The second generation neoclassical economists followed in a similar fashion, Fisher, Antonelli and Laundhardt all make the same metaphorical comparison. Fisher constructs for us a lengthy and helpful chart of comparisons between the two disciplines  – a particle is an individual, space is commodity, force is marginal utility or disutility, energy is utility, work or energy is equal to force x space, utility = marginal utility x commodity.

Numerous commentators have called the economics of Smith a kind of ‘newtonianism’ and implied that these metaphors continued onto neoclassical economics. However this gives a false impression – these statements are both vague and rarely made from the perspective of physics. For one, it is not clear that the oft repeated delination of physics into the classical physics of Galileo-Descartes-Newton followed by a drastic change that ushered in relativity and quantum mechanics is correct. This down plays the significant innovations of the 19th century that departed significantly from Newton  – energy conservation, the existence of physical fields physical fields, light as vibrations in ether, entropy. There had been attempts to use Newtonian equations in economics, but never an attempt to utilise him wholesale, since, for a variety of reasons it was difficult to use them, though this did not prevent Walras himself from attempting. The changes wrought by Helmholtz 1847 paper ‘On the conservation of force’ revolutionised the understanding of what physics was – it became the study of phenomena linked to energy change in systems – science of energetics was established. What this meant for neoclassical economics was wide – it provided the guiding metaphor, the required mathematics and the attitudes to theory construction. This is precisely what occured to Walras – after toying with using Newton to formalise his concept of rarete,  a letter from Antonie Paul Piccard, an engineer and professor of mathematics gave him the neccesary elements to develop this – these mathematics were drawn from energetics and were something he never understood but applied in any case.

Missing this moment in the 1870s misses a central plank in the scientific authority of neoclassical economics – its rich, thick layers of fetishised mathematical models. Naturally, they bear little relation to reality, unless the reality under observation are these energetic systems they initially described. The energetics metaphor is the central metaphor of neoclassical economics and it is this metaphor, rather than one of Newtonian atomism that should provide the point of historical analysis. In addition, this analysis is fascinating in showing us the neccesive role of metaphor in the human sciences generally, and the shift in entire methodologies once a different metaphor is adopted.