Choosing your targets: notes on Brown (2019)

In this essay I wish to share some thoughts on Wendy Brown’s 2019 book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.

Firstly, by way of opening, I consider there to be a fundamental tension within neoliberal philosophy, which is that it originates from classical liberalism (which is highly skeptical of state interventions) but constitutes a set of policy prescriptions that assume state involvement. We can see evidence of this tension in the debate around austerity: is it a mere step toward laissez-faire, or is it a means to utilise the state to achieve specific objectives? This “achilles heel” is not a weakness of neoliberal philosophy in my opinion, but is merely a reflection of the context in which the neoliberal project emerged: one of increasing size and scope of government, and a reaction to prevailing conditions. Having granted this tension, however, it could be tempting to treat neoliberalism as a contradiction. Indeed, Brown (2019) claims that:

“new forces conjoin familiar elements of neoliberalism (licensing capital, leashing labour, demonizing the social state and the political, attacking equality, promulgating freedom) with their seeming opposites (nationalism, enforcement of traditional morality, populist anti elitism, and demands for state solutions to economic and social problems)” (p.2)

But rather than present these as essential features of neoliberalism, she recognises that they constitute a novel situation where anti democratic forces have emerged out of the failures of neoliberalism.

This is an important point — rather than see the 2016 earthquakes of Trump and Brexit to be neoliberal moments, they reflect the ascent of other, older, and deeper issues. Brown (2019) even cites several Guardian articles that signal 2016 as neoliberalism’s “death knell”. She goes on to say, “this book addresses these issues by theorising how neoliberal rationality prepared the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious anti democratic forces in the second decade of the twenty-first century” (p.7).

In fact, she lists lists four specific reasons why “Neoliberalism yielded effects very different from those imagined and sought by its architects” (p.18), which are:

1. Populism (i.e. an “enraged” form of majority rule)
2. Financialization
3. The marketisation of morality
4. Nihilism, fatalism, and resentment

It seems to me that the middle two are more reasonably directly associated with neoliberalism, while the first and last reflect age old issues that may well be “fuelled” by neoliberalism but reflect much broader factors and trends. There is a danger that a neoliberal critique based on what follows neoliberalism misses its target.

If it is indeed the case that “neoliberalism produced a monster its founders would abhor (p.17) I would argue that it has two heads:

1. State capitalism (which I agree with)
2. Postmodernist identity politics (which I’m not sure about, but even if one accepts neoliberal complicity note that this contradicts with the first. Nihilism: don’t trust experts! State capitalism: outsource to technocracy! I think this therefore reduces neoliberalism’s culpability for both.)

I also find Brown’s (2019) claim that “the securitarian state grows along with privatization and is legitimated by it” (p.117) to be a valid observation. But if one strips neoconservatism from neoliberalism I am not sure that we would have seen the dynamics identified by Chris Coyne and Abigail Hall in their 2019 book, “Tyranny Comes Home”. Perhaps the outsourcing of police functions to privatised agencies reveals the imprint of neoliberalism, but the TSA is a federal agency. If these negative outcomes are a combination of an alliance between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, then really we have a critique of the latter masquerading as the former.

Brown (2019) is careful not to argue that neoliberalism is a cause, but a factor nevertheless. In doing so she poses an interesting challenge: if Marxists have to salvage their ideological platform from what Stalin did in its name, so too must neoliberals disentangle themselves from the “crony capitalism and international oligarchical power” (p.9) that rode the wave of deregulation and competitive market orders.

While I think that this is a reasonable point to make, it is quite easily dealt with: Lenin’s abandonment of communism was a reflection of the difficulty of implementing a utopian vision in the real world. Stalin’s horrors resulted from the dynamics of a system that centralised power and favoured the collective over the individual. A state capitalist global order of Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, by contrast, were not an inevitably linked consequence of Thatcher and Reagan’s reforms. Indeed we had a period of globalization, stability and prosperity in the meantime, and there are other, less damaging examples of neoliberal outcomes (e.g. Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand). If state capitalism is the combination of neoliberalism and other forces, then it is a weak argument against neoliberalism. If the current authoritarian populist right is a combination of neoliberalism and other forces, then it is a weak argument against neoliberalism. Or to quote myself from some of my other lectures (which I can give at your institution if you wish):

• The problem with state capitalism is the state, not capitalism.
• The problem with identity politics is the politics, not the identity.
• The problem with social media is the social, not the media.

A lot of Brown’s (2019) critique, as is common with the wider literature, rests on empirical claims that are taken as fact. Since agreement on the facts is an important prerequisite for any productive debate, I’d like to question several of her assertions.

• “the 2008 finance capital crisis devastated incomes, retirements, and home ownership for its working-class and middle-class white base” (p.4)— the footnote that follows does not provide empirical support for the claim made, but cites literature that attributes surging far-right sentiment to the 2008 financial crisis. So I am not sure what she means. I believe there are two main ways to interrogate Brown’s claim, however. The first is to establish the accuracy of the claim that incomes, retirements, and home ownership were “devastated”. The second objection is whether the 2008–09 recession was the inevitable result of a financial crisis or was in fact due to policy responses that allowed a market correction to snowball into a wider economic problem. I would love to know which of these is her position.
• “the privatization choking off access to higher education for the many” (p.6) — in the UK at least the number of students attending higher education has risen over time. It’s not clear over what time period Brown is making this claim, but where is the evidence?
• “much of Eastern Europe transitioned from state communism to neoliberal capitalism in less than half a decade” (p.18) — this begs the question of how much is “much”. In Branko Milanovic’s ‘Balance Sheet of Transition’ he argues that just 1 in 10 people living in a transition country enjoyed a successful outcome. But what does it mean to refer to Belarus as a “transition country”? It didn’t become capitalist, and it didn’t become a democracy. Of the 29 countries that emerged out of the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, how many of them actually transitioned to “neoliberal capitalism”? Is half “much”?
• “What is the taproot of Hayek’s animus toward society and social justice?” (p.31) — I think this has a simple answer, which is an emphasis on the individual versus the collective. Isn’t that what most of these political disagreements boil down to?
• Brown (2019) talks about “social justice warriors” and “snowflakes” (p.40) but what is the causal argument for how Hayek’s views on social justice relate to these concepts? Is it the case that populist politicians have weaponised their reading of ‘The mirage of social justice’; are think tanks to blame for feeding brainless politicians these memes; or is there a common heritage? To be clear, I think an argument can be made that some politicians have directly been inspired by Hayek to fight culture war issues, and some think tanks have leveraged their proximity to political actors to encourage them to emphasise such points. But without seeing Brown’s evidence it is not clear whether she is making a stronger claim than I would accept.
• In a passage discussing Hayek, Brown (2019) groups together “respect for private property, gender norms, and other traditional beliefs” (p.74) — where is the evidence of Hayek’s views on gender norms?
• “Women working more for less” (p.41) — is it the case that women work longer hours for less pay than previously? Or is the claim that women work longer hours for less pay than men? Neither seem correct, but without evidence it is hard to judge whether this is an empirical claim or a mere slogan.
• “The university is far from the only place where the Right gains a strategic edge through neoliberal reason’s relentless delegitimization of the concepts of the social and society” (p.43) — perhaps on this margin the right has an edge, but this claim completely neglects the fact that universities are almost entirely dominated by the progressive left. Or is that contested?
• “He [James Buchanan]… alloyed his brand of free enterprise with the project of white supremacism” (p.62) — this a bold and quite shocking claim, so why isn’t it supported with any evidence? Is Brown (2019) basing her claim on her reading of Maclean (2018)? Is it based on her reading of Buchanan? Or just a careless slander? If would be very interesting to know.
• “Hayek writes in one of his notebooks” (p97) — I’ve consulted the Hayek archive at Stanford and have found several of the short missives he wrote in later life to be insightful, and some mere ramblings. I do wonder whether such source material is being treated as important reflections of wider neoliberal thought, without being critically interrogated. Is there a general assumption that non published notes are more instructive than edited and published books and articles?
• According to Brown (2019), “‘Expanding the personal protected sphere’” is Hayek’s novel contribution to neoliberalism” and yet Hayek — a Nobel Prize winner himself, is the second most frequently cited economist in Nobel Prize addresses. Were his economic contributions to neoliberalism, such as ‘The Denationalisation of Money’, or ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, considered less important, or have they not been considered at all?
• “A world that reflects humanity as having brought the species to unprecedented misery and the planet to the brink of destruction” (p.181) —Which species is being referred to, and on what basis is it true that there is unprecedented misery? Stating that the planet is on the “brink of destruction” also seems to be a strong claim, but I accept it is a widely held one, and that it is sufficiently vague to not need evidence.

Chapter 1 illuminates the claim that “Society must be dismantled” and although I think it contains an accurate summary of Hayek’s work, I didn’t notice a substantive critique. Rather, the critical passages follow the attempt to link neoliberalism with the rise in alt right and other bad things. So to what extent is this a critique of neoliberalism, as opposed to a critique of those bad things? Let’s take the following analogy seriously: Trump is to neoliberalism as Stalin is to Marx. In which case, one might consider the MAGA movement in light of neoliberal groundwork, but it is not an adequate criticism of the neoliberal project itself. (I think a stronger case could be made that Bush/Blair were the equivalent of Stalin, in that it was they who properly steered the neoliberal hegemon. And indeed the Iraq war serves as a notable blot on their record. One might assign that mistake to the neoconservative element of the neoliberal ascendancy, but Brown herself has treated “neoliberalism and neoconservatism… as two distinct rationalities” (2019, p.91).

In the section on “actually existing neoliberalism” in chapter 3, the criticism is directed almost entirely at evangelical Christians, one more relegating the criticism of neoliberalism to how it might have enabled this. But if “neoliberalism is terrible because it’s been replaced by something bad”, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Brown (2019) also argues that “when the nation is privatized and familiarized in this way, it becomes legitimately illiberal toward adverse insiders and invading outsiders” (p.117). I think this can be contested — there a strong branch of cosmopolitan liberalism within contemporary neoliberal discourse — but there is a glaring absence of recourse to Chandran Kukathas’ notion of the “Liberal Archipelago”, and his (uneasy) claim that liberalism implies tolerating the intolerable.

Chapter 4 constitutes two case studies (relating to wedding cakes and pregnancy centres ) that show how attention to religious liberty has been co-opted into restrictive and unjust outcomes. Brown (2019) takes issue with supreme court decision, and those of Clarence Thomas. There is no mention of Thomas Sowell, the neoliberal economist who wrote “Social Justice Fallacies”, and who serves as a more likely source of inspiration to Thomas than Hayek. And her analysis reveals some flawed and disjointed reasoning. She claims that “First Amendment liberties are expanded beyond their classical civic meaning and even beyond market meaning” (p.126) but does this not reflect the only means possible to respond to prior legal overreach? If we take the classical liberal position — that it is not a proper function of government to mediate on who or what private businesses can choose to serve — then how do progressives expect such lawsuits to be fought, if not through convoluted legalisms? Indeed, the fact that Brown (2019) extends the discussion about a cake to so many pages demonstrates the point: it shouldn’t be an issue for The Supreme Court! Whether the baker is an “artist” or whether Christian beliefs warrant protected status should be an irrelevant consideration to the fact that the individual is free to choose who they transact with.

The hostility toward liberal values is clear when Brown (2019) claims that freedom of speech is “meaningless in the private realm of personal relationships” (p.139) and yet criminal convictions are imposed for WhatsApp messages. She asks: “where, precisely, is the action? Requiring the creation of a cake does not violate a right to free speech. Compelling exercise of artistic talents to express a message with which one disagrees does not violate one's First Amendment rights” (p.140) — sure, but requiring someone to make a cake, or compelling the exercise of talents, is the issue. Indeed, “commercial artists presumably do this all the time at the behest of their bosses or managers” (p.141) but that is by consent. A crucial difference. She later says that “the FACT Act does not stifle speech, and as we have seen it is a stretch to claim that it compels speech” (p.156), but it certainly wasn’t voluntary.

Brown (2019)’s discussion of pregnancy centres also exposes a critical ignorance about her intellectual opponents. She deems the information that was mandated to be displayed at so called “crisis pregnancy centers” as “essential, uncontroversial, factual information” (p. 144) and yet this is precisely what is being contested. Regardless of how factually correct the statements are, the issue is what legal obligations a private clinic has to provide it. By equating democracy with the state, the implication is that these sorts of Supreme Court findings are the only way to resolve this issue. But this neglects the existing capabilities of the state. In the UK the Trade Descriptions Act makes it illegal to mislead customers about the services being provided. In the US the FTC enforces “Truth in advertising” laws. Free speech, in a commercial setting, is already encumbered by concerns for accuracy. And in private settings the issue is harder to police but less socially relevant. If the concern is “the (often false) offer of free health care… [and] medical misinformation” (p.147) then some form of prosecution seems appropriate. Afterall, it is an error to claim that the alternative to “democratic legislation” is “unregulated markets” (p.157) — neoliberals fully recognise the necessaity of the state to regulate economic activity. All the government needs to do is establish whether any laws are being broken.

While Brown (2019) recognises that “Neither requirements would be needed if CPSs were not engaged in so much dissimulation and misinformation to advance their aims. The FACT Act was imposed on a structurally duplicitous and exploitative industry to correct for this duplicity” (p.148) she neglects the fact that this is only controversial because those CPCs receive federal funding. When Brown (2019) points out that “they obtained public funds” (p.157), rather than exposing an irony she is highlighting the source of the problem. The reason that “the court is permitting the vehicle of free speech to facilitate conservative Christianity’s escape from the private sphere to become a force in the commercial and public” (p.153) is because of an enlarged political sphere where contentious disputes get contested. The classical liberal solution would be to remove the state from such issues. The neoliberal solution requires a response by the state. But the implication of Brown’s (2019) critique is that such legal issues should be decided by democratic deliberation rather than the judicial system.

Ultimately, this section of the book constitutes a scathing attack on the influence of fundamental Christianity, with little attempt to make direct links to distinctly neoliberal thought. So while she criticises “Hayek’s ambition to replace social democracy and social justice with an order organized by markets and traditional mortality” (p.160) the closest textual evidence of Hayek discussing these themes is his explicit rejection of conservatism. Indeed it seems bizarre and somewhat outrageous that Brown (2019) considers that “Catholic clergy are revealed to have molested thousands of children” (p.162) to be something to hold neoliberalism accountable for, or that “the economizing side of neoliberalism added force to the nihilism of the age and also quickened it, first in leaving nothing untouched by entrepreneurialization and monetization and then, with financialization, submitting every aspect of human existence to investor calculations about its future value” (p.163) in any way describes the modern Catholic church.

The part of the book that appears to animate Brown the most is chapter 5, on nihilism. This is a crucial. I know that Mark Pennington has explored the links between postmodernism and neoliberalism in his recent book, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy, and I think there are two positions one can take: the first is that what might be attributed to neoliberalism should in fact be attributed to postmodernism; the second is that neoliberalism and postmodernism are related.

If one considers that we are in a “post truth” age where competing ideologies have been replaced with contested identity-based politics, then I am not sure whether this reduces the relevance of neoliberal thought or not. But note that although we are debating the bad things that have followed neoliberalism (i.e. Brown’s book is called “In the Ruins of Neoliberalism” and Slobodian refers to “Hayek’s Bastards”) neoliberalism is still used as the organising device. (As an aside, it’s interesting that when Brown (2019) lists the “agglomeration of elements in the rising right” (p.2) she includes libertarianism, moralism, authoritarianism, nationalism, anti-statism, Christian conservatism, and racism. But she neglects the tech arena, which Slobodian considers very important.)

Ultimately, I found the discussion of nihilism to constitute too much of a stretch to link quite different concepts together. Is the fact that “this aggression and viciousness is fed by neoliberal valorization of libertarian freedom, by wounded angry white maleness, and by nihilism’s radical depression of conscience and social obligation” (p.170) really a reflection of neoliberal values or of illiberal ones? And what does “I will because I can, because I believe in nothing and I am nothing other than my will to power” (p.171) even mean? Other passages were also confusing to read, implying that critiques of neoliberalism are as much literary criticism as works of political economy. Consider:

“And yet, the cocktail of disinhibited because disembedded freedom and politicized tradition abets a nihilism that tradition is supposed to inoculate against” (Brown 2019, p.122).

Finally, some minor criticisms:

• Brown (2019) repeats the claim that the term neoliberalism was “coined” at the Walter Lippmann colloquium, held in 1938 (p.17). However, Magness (2021) points out that just because this is the first time the word was used in print does not mean it was coined. Indeed it would be reasonable to assume that it was already being used prior to this event. He presents evidence of the word “neuliberalismus” being used since the 1920s, so presumably the English version took over at some point in between.
• I am somewhat confused by passages such as “Management, law and technocracy in place of democratic deliberation, contestation, and power sharing” (p.57) — the former are governance devices, the latter are governance principles.
• Brown (2019) expresses a moral hypocrisy in how Bill Clinton and Donald Trump’s various sexual indiscretions and offences have been treated (p.172), neglecting a key difference that Clinton’s Presidency was harmed by having received that infamous blowjob in office, whereas whatever Trump has done was factored into people’s decisions to vote for him.

Having read the whole book I was struck by the fact that Brown (2019) devotes a lot of effort to drawing links between neoliberalism and bad things, but also exhibits major blindspots. In particular, there is virtually no discussion of civil society (the term is briefly mentioned on p.56 but does not form part of her intellectual apparatus). This is interesting, because when she talks about “the neoliberal attack on the social” (p.28) she neglects the very sphere that classical liberal thinking emphasises. While it is reasonable to suggest that neoliberals place less emphasis on the social sphere than classical liberals, Brown (2019) is conscious of neoliberal attention to family units and religious affiliations. It does not seem a big leap, to me at least, to consider the vast swathes of community associations that characterise liberal attachment to non family and non market interaction. By conflating “the social” with “the state” Brown (2019) is simply ignoring the terrain upon which classical and neoliberal thinkers base their work. She argues: “neoliberals united in opposing robust democracy — social movements, direct political participation, or democratic demands on the state — which they identified with totalitarianism, fascism, or rule by mobs” (p.61). But what of the community groups and civic engagement that constitute liberal democracy: an independent judiciary, a free press, and non-government organisations? When Brown (2019) says that “Hayek… is content with voting and personal freedoms constituting the extent of democracy” (p.64) does she believe that neoliberals do not want a legal system at all?

Another potential blindspot is that if Brown’s task is to emphasise the importance of morality why is there no mention at all of Ayn Rand? If one is making an attempt to link an individualist philosophy to a new moral order then it would seem that objectivism rather than neoliberalism would be a good place to start. And yet there’s no discussion of this at all.

The problem here, perhaps, is that neoliberalism is sometimes accused of being amoral. So when Brown (2019) argues that “this symmetry in markets and morals sets Hayekian liberalism apart from libertarianism or even classical liberalism” (p.107), is the claim that the moral basis of neoliberalism is lacking, or that it is misguided? If it’s the latter, why ignore the recent attempts to articulate the moral basis of modern liberalism, such as David Schmidtz’s ‘Living Together’?

In the Ruins if Neoliberalism is an important contribution to the literature on neoliberalism, but I continue to find it frustrating that so much of those hostile works neglect classically liberal works. So I will finish by listing five books that I implore critics of neoliberalism to read:

• Kukathas, C., 2003, The Liberal Archipelago, Oxford University Press
• McCloskey, D. N., 2006, The Bourgeois Virtues, University of Chicago Press
• Horwitz, S., 2015, Hayek’s Modern Family, Palgrave Macmillan
• Koyama, M., and Rubin, J., 2022, How the World Became Rich, Polity
• Pennington, M., 2025, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy, Oxford University Press