Critique as ideology critique in a neoliberal age

1. Critique as ideology critique

Outlined in several major essays written in the mid-1930s (1972 and 1993) Horkheimer’s classical account of ideology critique distinguishes its diagnosis of systemic distortions concerning historical development from an immanently critical search for mere blind spots, contradictions and oversights. For, critical theory’s purpose ‘is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better functioning of any element in the structure’. On the contrary, the critical attitude is deeply suspicious of those categories of the ‘better, useful, appropriate, productive and valuable’ that turn out to be dictated by idealized rules of conduct that sustain ‘the blind interaction of individual activities’. Critical theory wants to restore the self-insight of concrete social beings into their historical being and into their agency. The veil of a ‘second nature’ is to be ripped aside to allow us to recognize ‘the present form of economy and the whole culture which it generates [as] the product of human work…these men [are to] identify themselves with this totality and conceive it as will and reason. It is their own world’. Critical theory delivers a total change in how the world might be experienced. A lifetime of oppression, exploitation and war stands exposed as something alien and hostile to our humanity. It is a world that is modelled on ‘nonhuman natural processes’, on pure mechanisms. ‘That world is not their own but the world of capital’ (1972, 207–8).

However, critical theory does not just turn on the opposition between a yet-to-be-made future that would objectify a new self-consciousness of our species capacity to humanize, and so assume responsibility for, the world and an alienated present that is experienced as ‘a form of deadened existence’ inside ‘a naturally developing organism’ (1972, 208). Refusing to spin out from utopian abstractions, whose ‘truthfulness’ only amounts to their offer to help us cope with unchosen forms of existence, critical theory insists on breaking out of the ‘self-enclosed realm within society’ that is allocated to theory. It wants to lend its totalizing perspective to all those concrete activities that already betray an incipient, fragmentary consciousness that this is ‘our world’ and it needs to be made fit for us to live in (1972, 242–3).

In 1937, Horkheimer could still plausibly appeal to a Marxist philosophy of history and to a faith in the unfolding self-consciousness of the proletariat concerning its imputed historical mission. The ‘accusatory meaning’ that clings to this rendering of ideological thinking recalls Marx’s interest in clarifying the historical trajectory of ‘the raw power struggles of real human beings’ against the ‘mystifying cloak of ideology’ that is bent upon naturalizing the present (Horkheimer, 1993, 143 and 149). However, once the web of these undergirding faiths is severed by socialism’s defeats and bitter self-betrayals, critical theory risks folding its role down to over-sighting a static epistemological opposition between a posited truth of history that is denied, held ransom to, a mystified, alienated immediacy. For a densely opaque age that is, more or less, reconciled to its own structural complexities and has, in the main, grasped pluralism as a core value, a teleological construction of history as progress has lost its easy cultural resonance. As Horkheimer was to growingly appreciate, the presumption of a living dialectic between theoretical reflection provided by Marxism and the immediacy of the struggles of the age could not survive the sociological realities of the late 20th century.

Perhaps, though, there are some remainders to Horkheimer’s early, no longer fully persuasive, iteration of the tasks and the cultural resources of critical theory that might offer guidance to ideology critique in the neo-liberal age. Robin Celikates is persuaded that critical theory still needs to configure itself as a critique of ideology. He hopes to retrieve the core purposes of ideology critique as the exposure of the efficacy of ideological thinking in hindering ‘the use of critical and judgmental capacities in social practices’. Ideologies are charged with blocking ‘the transformation of capacities into abilities’ and preventing ‘the realization of one’s self-understanding as a judging and acting subject’ (2006, 35). For Celikates, the critique of ideology ‘makes agency possible by criticizing social arrangements, practices and self-understandings that have an inhibitory rather than enabling effect’ (2006, 36). There is not much here that remains recognizable from Horkheimer’s Marxist account of the tasks of critical theory. Reducing critique to an epistemology that facilitates an abstract will to power and, essentially, unrationalized action, Celikates does not demonstrate how critical theory might claim responsiveness to the distinctly progressive struggles of the day. In particular, this proposed revival of ideology critique misses Horkheimer’s central demarcation between an enabling of the ‘better functioning’ of existing structures and wants and critical theory’s investment in measuring existing arrangements against their fitness to our humanity.

A retrieval of ideology critique needs to scope itself in the broad terms that were laid down in Horkheimer’s objections to Karl Mannheim’s sociological theory of ideology (1993). Horkheimer insisted that Mannheim’s diagnosis of ideological thinking, as a dogmatic blockage of rival ways of representing our cultural potentials, suggests an only weak critical power. Something more is required of the discriminating, judgemental purposes of ideology critique. For us, this ‘more’ cannot be the rehabilitation of Marx’s philosophical critique of the present from the standpoint of history’s imputed progress towards overcoming alienation. Nonetheless, a critical appropriation of ideology critique today cannot just limit itself to challenging dogmatic closures against alternative world views. A case needs to be made for why this suppressed normativity needs to be rehabilitated, reinterpreted perhaps, and rationally chosen as our best historical potentials.

We begin to reveal neo-liberalism as an ideological project as we reflect upon its concerted and sustained intentions to close down, not merely the social democratic institutions of the post-war period, but the, only half self-understood, utopian idealizations that underwrote these initiatives as well. Honneth tells us that the neo-liberal revolution slammed on the brakes against the ‘normative progress’ of a social democratic politics that introduced claims about needs, not just private rights, into modern politics (2012, 172–3). Certainly critique needs to be able to identify cultural and political losses. However, for critique to raise what has been lost as a measure against the imperatives organizing the present, it must also seek to retrieve what always remained out of reach to imperfect representations of now blocked cultural potentials. Ideology critique in the neo-liberal age cannot simply appeal to the lost normativity of a complacent social democratic project. After all, social democracy was not able to offer a robust self-defense and has so far not been able to fully disentangle itself from a web of perverse neo-liberal representations about the options for post–liberal societies. As Horkheimer insists, ideology critique raises suppressed cultural potentials as an ‘accusation’ against their ideological blockages and we need to rethink how social democratic normativity might rise to the challenge.

2. Market justice and social justice: Drawing the battle-lines

Stuart Hall observes that neo-liberalism is a concept that ‘lumps too many things together’ and in doing so it sacrifices insight into its own internal complexity and geohistorical specificity. Giving up on the quest for conceptual clarity, he elects to use ‘neo-liberalism’ as politically necessary in order ‘to give resistance content, focus and cutting edge’ (2011, 2). When Hall does fill in some distinctive features of a neo-liberal world view he finds that it is grounded in ‘the free possessive individual’ and that it casts that state as ‘tyrannical and oppressive’ (2011, 2). Having decried the concept for its indeterminancy, Hall proceeds to scope its meaning in terms that are essentially indistinguishable from the old classical liberalism.

To grasp the specificity and the internal complexity of ‘neo-liberalism’, Streeck brings it into view as political project that intends to close down a competing social democratic response to structural problems of democratic capitalism. His pointed question ‘[h]ow will capitalism end?’ is pitched from a diagnosis of a contest between two rival criteria of justice in which the acknowledgement of their incompatibility has emerged as the stakes. Streeck’s account of the tasks that confront a re-positioning of the social democratic project as the grounds for a critique of neo-liberalism has some advantages. In the first place, it offers sociological insight into why this project had failed to rise to the challenge and decisively take on the neo-liberal ‘no choice, no costs’ advocacy of the reduction of social justice to market justice.

Streeck is persuaded that the economic boom of the immediate post-war years set the conditions for a lazy appreciation of the challenges that were facing capitalist democracies. Unprecedented economic growth masked the structural tensions between capital, driven by the imperatives of limitless accumulation, and the demands of a newly politicized labour force for expanded welfare states, free collective bargaining and a political guarantee of full employment. Struggling with competing imperatives, governments were provided with additional goods and services by which to defuse and mask class antagonisms (Streeck, 2016, 79). Habermas makes a similar point. With a considerable portion of the domestic product at their disposal, the regulatory states of the post-war period were able, he tells us, to apply growth measures on the one side, and social policies on the other to simultaneously stimulate the economy and guarantee social integration (2001, 50). This happy coincidence would not last and the economic supports of confidence in limitless collective progress began to disintegrate as uninterrupted growth petered out. The consensus that regulatory institutions could restrain the advance of capitalism, saving it from debilitating crises and extracting concessions for citizens, began to fall apart during the 1970s. From that time, governments under economic capitalism came under pressure to cease accommodating redistributive wage settlements and to restore monetary discipline (Streeck, 2016, 79). A raft of economic measures, including tolerance for inflation and public debt and the deregulation of private credit, failed to artificially reproduce the relatively easy accommodations of the post-war years. These were only ever a bid to ‘buy time’ against the economic and social disorder that would be the automatic setting yielded by the fundamental contradictions that were pulling democratic capitalism apart (Streeck, 2014).

For Axel Honneth, the conviction that limitless growth and unstoppable energies would resource a new, politically demanding, ideal of justice, as the rational arbitration of a multiplicity of need claims upon public goods, came under stress from ‘a whole bundle of factors’ (Honneth, 2014, 245). However, a key difference between this and Streeck’s version of the winding back of social democratic reforms makes itself felt as distinct understandings of the normative grounds of ideology critique in the neo-liberal age. Honneth’s ‘bundle of factors’ that produced the turn included the ‘gradual autonomization of the imperatives of the financial and capital markets’ and the deregulation of the labour market, ‘making part-time and temporary employment the norm’ (2014, 244). His suggestion that neo-liberalism stole the ‘normative progress’ that had been made by social democratic reformism contrasts with Streeck’s stress on the exceptionality of social democratic reformism and on the task that yet awaits it to fully grasp its challenges and its distinct normativity. On this point of view, Honneth’s bid to restore normative progress to grasp the full extent of the normative reconstruction that is called for.

The oil crisis of the mid-1970s had already sent shock waves through the Keynesian consensus, exposing the deep structural strains that gnawed at its ambitions to manage market uncertainty in the public interest. Seizing the opportunity and twisting the narrative, neo-liberal initiatives increasingly dislodged policies that were geared to growth through egalitarian distribution replacing them with agendas that were oriented to growth through stronger incentives for winners. Streeck remarks that this Hayekian agenda aimed at refunctioning the state, retaining its acquired strength but now using this power to fend off democratic political claims for market correction and for redistributive wage settlements leaving the economy to the self-regulating market and unleashing uncertainty (2016, 155). This recalibration did not primarily take place through repression ‘but by moving the governance of the political economy to a level where democracy cannot follow, and the institutions constitutionally designed to be exempt from political contestation with legally enshrined missions, whose authority ‘does not come out of gun barrels’ but is designed from ‘scientific’ economic theory (2016, 156).

Complicating Habermas’s earlier proposition that the post-war compromise between capitalism and the democratic nation state had been seeded by a painful ‘learning from catastrophe’ in the post-war, post-fascist, period (Habermas, 2001, 38–58), Streeck finds that the relatively easy passage of a post-war boom economy had permitted the social democratic project to underestimate the challenge of its constitutive tensions. The ongoing learning process must grasp the nettle of warring ideas of justice that are to be engineered into a compromise. Perhaps though there is only a shift in emphasis here that reflects an ever more weary acknowledgement of the task that Habermas had already outlined? After all, despite his relatively upbeat diagnosis in the 1980s, Habermas had also underlined that the welfare compromise by no means fully appreciated its own paradigm shift in thinking about our utopian potentials. From now on the idealization of a self-realizing, self-asserting, humanity would need to be rearticulated as the utopian investment in those social and political processes that facilitate the rational arbitration of a multiplicity of claims on behalf of self-interpreted needs (Habermas, 1989). There are not fundamentally competing accounts of the normative significance of a social democratic project at play here. Rather it is his insistence that this must be forged on the battlefield of warring ideas of social justice that makes Streeck’s account of the histories and of the task rather different.

For Streeck, the political economy of the social democratic compromise straddles two competing regimes of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or free play of market forces and the other ‘based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics’ (2016, 75). Resting upon a series of economic and political pacifications, this project has proved to be unstable, crisis prone, relying upon political institutions and policy initiatives without the legitimacy that was required to support their regulatory purposes. Habermas suggests that the social democratic project aimed to pick and choose between the competing tendencies within capitalism, making use of the ‘allocative and innovative’ functions of self-regulating markets while avoiding the ‘unequal patterns of distribution and other social costs’ (2001, 50). Streeck, by contrast, calls upon a re-thinking of this project to recognize the essential inhospitality of the self-regulating market to democratic egalitarian, redistributive politics. He appeals to Karl Polanyi to remind us that capitalism’s drive to commodify everything cannot even be relied upon to save itself. Its logic of profit through exchange requires some effective resistance from the use values that underpin those ‘fictitious commodities’, land, labour and money, to sustain and reproduce itself. However, while it relies on the inextinguishable particularity of other values, capitalism is also hostile to these restraints. To these tensions endemic to capitalism, the post-war compromise added the burden of a second layer of tensions between capitalism and the redistributive demands of a democratic politics. Neo-liberalism undertook to resolve this tenuous setting by reducing social justice to market justice.

There is, on the one hand, not much of an argument between the various critics on the costs of neo-liberal colonizations and its monological reductions. Wendy Brown observes that: ‘neo-liberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not an issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always and everywhere as homo economicus’ (2015, 31). However, substantive agreement about cultural losses does not indicate strong consensus about how to weigh the logic of this development. Honneth finds that it amounts to a ‘social misdevelopment’ that undermines of the ‘normative potential of the market’ (2014, 177). He means that, if we listen properly to Hegel, Durkheim and Polanyi, we discover that functioning market relations are embedded in pre-contractual solidarities that ‘obligate economic actors to treat each other fairly and justly’ (2014, 181). This conditioning ethical embedding is, we learn, discarded by the triumph of a competitive market justice. The normative guideposts remain ready to be retrieved from the aberrations of neo-liberal misdevelopment. Streeck reads the significance of Polanyi’s diagnosis of the embeddedness of markets differently. Capitalism’s ineluctable reference to the qualitative values of ‘fictitious commodities’ suggests that it remains answerable to purposes other than the motivations of homo economicus. These purposes and values are, however, no part of the semantics of market justice. They have to be excavated and brought into a confrontation with a neo-liberal ideology that seeks to represent them in its own terms. Streeck recommends that a ‘Chinese wall’ be erected between the two rival, equally required, demands of market justice and a redistributive social justice (2016, 188).

Identifying as a social democrat, Streeck is not attracted to the rhetorical open-endedness of Brown’s call for ‘more radical democratic imaginaries’ to break through a normative vacuum that is left in the wake of neo-liberalism’s drive to commodify everything (Brown, 2015, 18). Radically reformed liberal democratic institutions that are able to defend egalitarian and pluralistic social justice from the attacks by the neo-liberal state and right-wing populist revolts need to be put back on their feet. Streeck’s observation that ‘[s]ome sort of balance must be struck between the needs of people and the needs of capital’ (2016, 246) is mindful too of the lessons learnt by the economic dysfunction of the post-war command economies. However, if a new balance that fully acknowledges the split between capitalist democracy’s competing modes of justice is to be struck, something of Streeck’s deep pessimism about the capacity of a social democratic project to require the market to host some of its vital agendas has to give way. There is, for example, no necessary uprooting of the imperatives of market justice in an environmental politics that is seeks to make a good ‘business case’ for renewable sources of energy. At the same time, any suggestion of an essential normative sympathy between market justice and social justice is disproven every time the fallacy of ‘trickle down economics’ is put into play. Contemporary ideology critique can take its first step from Streeck’s commitment to bring a social democratic project forward from the half-light of its first iterations. This time social democracy can expect no free rides, it must be actively rethought and rechosen, ‘learning from the catastrophe’ of its own faltering under attack from a deeply hostile neo-liberalism. To inquire further into what this rehabilitation might require, we need to contemplate how a crafty neo-liberalism has managed to suppress and confuse all major rivals in the determination of our historical potentials.

3. The battle between political rationalities

Elaborated in 1978 in a series of public lectures, Foucault’s early account of Atlanto-European neo-liberalism would not seem to be the obvious place to look for these next steps. The Birth of Biopolitics is necessarily out of touch with current complexities and new developments and Foucault’s ambivalent reception of neo-liberalism and his critical appreciation of the social democratic project appear to disqualify it for refining the tasks of ideology critique in a neo-liberal age. It turns out, though, that the untimeliness of Foucault’s early diagnosis is well placed to clarify neo-liberalism as a project, unmasking the strategies it has used to entrench its political rationalities against main rivals. Foucault offers a still relevant account of neo-liberalism’s self-defining bid to block and replace a social democratic rejoinder to classical liberalism in the post-war world. Foucault had a sneaking admiration for neo-liberalism and we can work with this also. He approved of its repudiation of humanist anthropologies that underpinned liberalism and were, he supposed, taken over in a social democratic response to it. Foucault’s early diagnosis takes us to where the bodies are buried as we search for the normative grounds for ideology critique in a neo-liberal age.

Focusing on the rise of Ordo-liberalism in post-war Germany, Foucault is intrigued by this early neo-liberal challenge to classical liberalism. More than a set of piecemeal trends and policy initiatives, neo-liberal political rationality changed the liberal relationship between the state and the economy. The extent of this revision is not to be underestimated. Political liberalism had already embraced an idea of state power that, rather than standing guard over a pre-political domain of natural rights, is limited by demands rising from market imperatives. Market relations no longer seek external justifications but are locked in by the naturalization of their necessary motivations and required behaviours. This homo economicus is a ‘naturally’ self-interested, pragmatic, self-contained soul who is bent upon maximizing his capacity to provide for his own needs. The market is a reserved space of unimpeded freedom and demands only to be left alone. Government should be economical, expending only the power that is required for affective administration of society and protection of private property. By contrast, neo-liberalism promises to ‘economize’ the state. No longer a limit on the state, the economy is the new essential model for, as well as the object of, government itself.

How does this revolutionary new idea take place? Foucault finds its origins in Freiburg in the late 1940s, a little university town that was just beginning to grapple with the history of Nazism. It might be supposed that the aftermath of Nazism would have seen an enthusiasm for revitalizing the classical liberal tradition that had presented itself as a natural enemy to Nazism. However, the Ordo-liberals around Walter Eucken find some agreement with Nazism’s critique of a liberal market that ripped people out of organic communities and ‘reduced individuals to the state of atomistic subject to an abstract authority in which they do not recognize themselves’ (Foucault, 2008, 139). The Ordo-liberals are persuaded that in Nazism’s promise to rid society of the deficits of private property, standardizing consumption and mass spectacle, there is a deep hypocrisy. Instead, these mass phenomena of standardization and spectacle should be sheeted back to the state. Henceforth, the eighteenth century call for limits on state intervention on the market economy is to be replaced by demand that the free market offer itself as the organizing and regulating principle of the state (Foucault, 2008, 140).

Classical liberalism had been swept along in the romance of a ‘naïve naturalism’: the market was a given of nature, the spontaneous organization of self-interested appetites, instincts and behaviours. Yet the seismic convulsions of the markets of the thirties that had precipitated policies of protectionism and planning had blasted apart the old confidence in laissez-faire. Just as redistributive social democratic welfare programs offered to respond to this crisis of confidence, so too neo-liberalism’s proposal to replace liberalism with an economic constructivism calls upon state power to exert ‘permanent vigilance, activity and intervention’ (Foucault, 2008, 143) in the market. Intervening in the market to manage uncertainty and to offer the more efficient allocation of resources, the Keynesian state undertook to cushion workers against a system that was designed to extract surplus value from labour. In the neo-liberal state, economic growth, global competitiveness and maintenance of a strong credit rating increasingly vouches for the success of government policy.

Keynesian reforms offered a regime of mutual checks, regulations and corrections: the market would provide the individual with a domain of freedom against the state, and the state would watch over the market for the sake of the well-being of citizens (Skidelsky, 2009, 161–2). Abandoning this fraught ambition to balance rival claims, the neo-liberal state is modelled after the economy and also intervenes in it, though not for the demos, not for a public interest. How is this double profile, of the market as model for the state and the object of its interventions supposed to work? This brings us to the second major way in which neo-liberalism breaks with classical liberal thought. Foucault is convinced that there is no debilitating paradox in the neo-liberal state, once the difference between market logics and market behaviours is taken into account. It is the logic of the market, its set of internal norms and its organic principles of rationality, its ‘invisible hand’, which provides the model for the state. Reference to market behaviour suggests a mode of conduct, a modus operandi that is required of the self, this behavioural ‘logic’ of individuals in the market place requires ‘permanent vigilance’. While welfare state interventions into the market are rationalized against the separate requirements of redistributive justice, neo-liberal intervention has no limit, its object, human behaviour radically expands the scope of governmentality. ‘Government does not correct the destructive effects of the market on society’, it has to intervene in society itself, in its fabric and depth’ (Foucault, 2008, 143).

The neo-liberal marketization of society does not always just involve monetization, an even more radical principle of reconstruction is at stake. Intending to remodel behaviour as such, neo-liberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities, even where money is not an issue, configuring human beings exhaustively as market actors. To find neo-liberals expressly describing the effort to transform the behaviour of subjects, Foucault is persuaded that we must switch our attention from the German Ordo-liberals to the American anarcho-liberal variant of neo-liberalism. As we have seen, in Germany Ordo-liberalism emerged from the mid-1930s in response to Nazism. To economize society it was crucial that everyone had access to private property and this meant assistance to the unemployed, interventions in housing policy and so on. In certain respects this intervention did resemble social welfare policies and ambitions of the economists in the Keynesian camp. By contrast, the Chicago school of economics reacted against and wholly repudiated New Deal Keynesianism. Shaped by the liberal individualism of a pioneering past, this American brand of neo-liberal economics embraced the unlimited extension of the market into every endeavour and sphere of action.

The classical liberal homo economicus, a naturally self-interested agent dedicated to a life of calculating equivalences and deal making, was to be replaced by a neo-liberal version. For the neo-liberal homo economicus, there is nothing natural about market conduct. Self-interested, self-promoting behaviours must be actively shaped and continuously cultivated. The neo-liberal self is not rooted in the naturalization of a strategizing, calculating psychology nor is its conduct rationalized by a market logic that is governed by the principle of exchange. Competition drives the market and its conditions and motivational resources must be actively produced. Crucially, for Foucault, while the classical liberal self was retardant of power, radically self-contained, desirous only of being left alone, the neo-liberal individual is ‘eminently governable’. He/she is actively produced through a network of social policies and institutions all pitched to fit out the entrepreneurial, competitive, resourceful self for the economic game of winners and losers.

Destined to shift for himself/herself, the liberal homo economicus had been pushed to the limit by economic crises and world war and needed putting back on his/her feet. For the social democrat, this had partly meant that the individual required that material conditions be put in place that would enable them to secure both their livelihood and their practical autonomy. By the mid-1980s, Habermas was reflecting on the contradictions between the libertarian goals and the bureaucratic methods that had deeply strained this undertaking (1989). Already in the late 1970s Foucault was alert to the authoritarian, normalizing implications of the state offer to support the failing liberal self. By contrast, neo-liberal interventions were restricted to manipulations of the environmental contexts and this promised to release the individual both from essentializing liberal discourses and from the straitjackets of a welfare state concerned about their well-being.

Michael Behrent is persuaded that it was his own abiding hostility to humanism that made neo-liberalism attractive to Foucault (2016, 27). A humanist tradition that had affirmed ‘man as the measure’ had fallen victim to Foucault’s diagnosis of the repressive philosophical underpinnings of disciplinary power. As he saw it, this was a normalization that installed a particular image of ‘man’ as its standard and so Foucault came to register an apparent libertarian gain for a pluralistic ideal of autonomy in neo-liberalism’s post-liberal image of homo economicus. The neo-liberal project had sought to justify its marketization of society as an increase of freedoms and this ‘liberalism without humanism’ did not mean the mere expansion of the entitlements of a rights bearing subject. Instead it meant the interventions to expand of modes of conduct that embraced risk, affirmed initiative and abandoned all repressive measures of difference.

Foucault approves of the utilitarian direction that the justification of policies and programs had taken in neo-liberalism’s radical reworking of liberalism. The state was to supply the legal framework that permits market competition to approximate its ideal form. Its interventions into the fabric of social life did not appeal to the primacy of any anthropological measures, only to a necessary scoping of the environmental conditions that would reward entrepreneurial behaviours. In this regard, Foucault was attracted to the ‘negative tax’ policies that were initiated by the Chicago economist Milton Friedman. With the negative tax the government breaks with the distinction between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poor and severs the tendency of the welfare state to link payments to behaviours. Targeting ‘illness, accidents and usefulness for work’, what matters is solely that the recipients are guaranteed an income that allows them to be players in the economic game (Foucault, 2008, 202–5). The rules of the game would be acted upon, not the players. This would be an intervention into contexts that does not internally subjugate individuals

The tasks of the ideology critique in the neo-liberal age now come more clearly into focus. We saw that to do the work that Horkheimer sets for it, critique must ensure that it is not simply buying into already set standards of measure, convicting ideological world views of blind spots and contradictions as it undertakes to do better. However, while ideology critique is required to reflect upon and review the normative grounds that underpin such judgements, it cannot make do with simply affirming the difference of its own competing value ideals. Ideology critique, is an ‘accusation’ that discloses the interests and disarms the strategies that ideological settings deploy as they contrive to shut down the grounds of review. How is this reinstated rationality to establish its worth, its credentials to be the measure? Following up Foucault’s reflections on the rise of neo-liberal political rationality has permitted us to shift this question out of the realm of rejected philosophies of history leaving behind also any appeals to anthropological truths. This diagnosis allowed us to track how neo-liberalism had suppressed a rival social democratic normativity along with its repudiation of classical liberalism. Zoning further into the normative territory that might be retrieved as the ground of ideology critique in the neo-liberal age, we draw upon aspects of what we also learnt in our discussion of Streeck about the effort that would be required to rethink what the social democratic project is doing.

4. Ideology critique in a neo-liberal age

The preceding discussion has given some preliminary form to the challenges and the options that confront ideology critique in the neo-liberal age. I now want to draw these indicative findings and pointed questions through a refinement of the tasks of ideology critique that we began in our earlier discussion of Horkheimer. I will look to some key aspects of Markus’s critical reading of Marx on ideology to help us to rethink the normativity of the social democratic project as we explore how it might rise to the tasks set by contemporary ideology critique.

Markus several times makes the point that Marx’s references to ‘ideology’ and to ‘ideology critique’ have a relatively fragmentary character, they are not fully embedded in a systematic framework (1983, 1995 and 2011). Perhaps, we might cautiously take advantage of the disorganized character of Marx’s remarks as we seek to appropriate some of these observations about the workings of ideology and apply them to the tasks of critique in neo-liberal age. After all, to reconceptualize the humanist underpinnings of Marx’s account of ideology critique in terms that might be hosted by a reformist social democratic project with a pluralistic and open-ended view of historical progress, these commitments would need to be uprooted from any systematizing philosophical intentions, teleologies of progress or purely anthropological anchorages.

First published in 1995, Markus’s essay ‘On Ideology Critique-Critically’ identifies two main uses of ‘ideology’ in Marx, which are mostly found in The German Ideology. Markus begins by reconstructing a critical/polemical meaning. Here ‘ideology’ refers to the masking of sectarian interests and to the legitimating purposes of representations that nominate the turn of ideas and their systems as the drivers of historical progress. In polemical contexts, the critique of ideology targets ideology’s directly apologetic, justificatory functions. Ideologies make particular interests appear as though general, universal, via their systematizations and ‘pseudo rationalizations’ of the ‘spontaneous illusions shared by members of a particular social group or class’. In this connection, critique of ideology operates ‘with the method of sociological reduction, that is, the uncovering behind a system of ideas or representations their genuine practico-social life basis: a constellation of interests as the “true motives” of the particular historical agents, determined by the “dominant material relations” which find their “ideal expression” in the given cultural forms’ (Markus, 2011, 460).

A particular, limited reading of Marx’s polemical use of ‘ideology’ finds its way into David Harvey’s diagnosis of neo-liberalism as the engineering of, and smoothing the way for, a shift within capitalism from production to the world of finance (2005, 31–32). However, it seems that a contemporary appropriation of ideology critique can do considerably more with Markus’s nuanced account of what Marx meant. After all, if the polemical use of ‘ideology’ only refers to an apologetics for readjustments within the ruling class, we lose any trace of ‘ideology critique’ as the blockage of possible ways of rethinking our futures. Markus makes the point that in Marx the method of critical reduction of ideas to ‘well defined configurations of social interests plays only a subordinate, indeed marginal role’. More importantly, Marx’s criticism of the idealized expression that systems of ideas gives to certain social interests refers to their ‘epochal’ significance ‘as theoretical expressions of a perspective connected with a type of society, and not primarily as those of concrete, momentary interests of a definite class or stratum in this society’ (2011, 462). In general, ‘ideological thinking’ refers to the occlusion by representations of history as the movement of abstract ideas of the necessary role that is played by ‘decisive social struggles’ in the practical transformations of material life conditions. Against this ideological view of history, Marx appeals to the humanist conviction that historical development must be measured in the name of the historically and socially defined particular and limited needs of concrete social actors.

How might we use a polemic against ideological thinking that was fashioned in the 19th-century revolutionary Europe to refine the tasks of ideology critique in our own neo-liberal age? We have already noted that neo-liberalism represents itself as ‘end of ideology’ that relies upon pragmatism to justify its marketization of social life and modern institutions. Foucault was pulled in by this self-representation as the confirmation that neo-liberalism had indeed broken from the disciplinary power that clung to classical liberalism’s idealization of the self-mastering, autonomous subject. To unmask neo-liberalism as an ideology in the terms targeted by Marx we need, in the first instance, to establish that it does appeal to abstract, dogmatic representations of modern freedoms and historical progress and that these idealizations are deeply implicated in the justification of a particular ‘type of society’.

Margaret Thatcher’s well-known announcement that, ‘[e]conomics is the method but the object is to change the soul’, is something of a confusion. For Foucault, a new, and to him welcome, agnosticism about inner life limited neo-liberalism’s interventions to an encouragement of forms of conduct that position the individual to play the economic game. Yet there is some truth to Thatcher’s proclamation. The contents of the liberal soul live on but no longer as the site of a unique personality. Rather than uprooting the classical liberal idealization of self-fashioning, autonomous subjectivity, neo-liberalism finally only inverts it. Certainly, as Foucault tells us, neo-liberalism is clear that the self-sufficient, self-responsible subject is no gift of nature. It has to be constituted, to be fashioned and refashioned in order to address the vulnerability of over-burdened private individuals. However, it also becomes clear that the ideal of the self-reliant, infinitely resourceful subject offers the ideological fixture against which all our social interactions, modes of intercourse and institutions are to be judged. We are to be equipped, trained, skilled up as jobholders, householders and retirees to be centres of initiative and resilience. The team work, the mandated collaborative endeavours of the neo-liberal workplace is, as Richard Sennett suggests, a further indication of neo-liberalism’s convoluted re-staging of liberalism’s idealization of private autonomy as the grounds of modern freedoms (1998). The dynamism and agenda-setting aspirations of liberal private freedoms are ripped out of this new rendition of our interdependencies and dependencies. The ‘team’, as sociologists of the new capitalist work place confirm (Sennett, 1998 and Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), is supposed to redress the insufficiencies of the isolated individual however this needy interdependency is not to be discovered by concrete subjects themselves as they go about establishing the practical conditions of their freedoms. Instead a troubled awareness of insufficiency is assigned to failing selves who are judged in accordance with an unreachable abstraction: the rehabilitated liberal self as a psychological fixture.

Neo-liberalism’s offer to coach us into the role of the self-starter might seem to recognize our singularity and respond to the deficits of our concrete histories. However, all the neo-liberal planner needs to know about us is that we are failing and that we need to be supported and trained. This is the point of entry for an unmasking ideology critique. To fully expose the abstract idealizations that masquerade as neo-liberalism’s responsiveness to concrete human vulnerability and insufficiency, all the while standing over the experiential as its scripted measure, ideology critique is called upon to elaborate its alternative post-liberal account of building modern freedoms. This will be the platform from which we can begin to measure and subvert neo-liberalism’s perverse ideological purposes.

At stake here is a reflection upon the normative weight that can be applied to the thematic of politics as the ‘politicization of needs’ that was a central motif in the social democratic heyday. Crucially, this social democratic reference to the neediness and dissatisfactions of concrete individuals has never been the underside of an idealized, self-sufficient individuality. Nor is it appropriately understood as a marker only of systematic disadvantage recognized by targeted welfare policies. Rather than standing as an experience of personal inadequacy or accidental disadvantage with respect to a mandated ideal of the self-sustaining personality, it refers to new pluralism and democratization of the demand for self-determined lives and signals an expanded recognition of the interdependencies and institutional frameworks that are necessarily discovered as their practical conditions. Even if the precise terminology only ever received a rather limited currency, the thematic of the ‘politicization of needs’ was taken up by a host of social democratic theorists, including Habermas (1989), Nancy Fraser (1989) and Maria Markus (1995). There are no anthropological props here that propose to score certain human traits with an essentiality. The ‘politicization of needs’ does not affirm any particular human need, such as recognition, as fundamental. Rather it reflects upon the significance of social democracy’s introduction of need interpretation and the rationalization of need claims into modern politics. This politics had invested normativity in the processes though which concrete individuals were stirred by the new possibility of raising their particular needs as claims that ought to find satisfaction via the use of public resources. The ‘politicization of needs’ reflects upon the remaking of a democratic and pluralistic social life that is set in motion when conditions for the rationalization and satisfaction of claims about concrete needs are set in place.

Maria Markus helps us to understand the normativity that is invested in the politicization of needs via an example from feminist activism about childcare. She makes the point that when the childcare is raised as a social need that requires the allocation of public resources, the rationalization of this claim introduces a host of broader topics for general discussion. These might include: ‘[w]hat is the equitable distribution of responsibilities in this respect?’ and ‘What modes of life should an appropriate childcare accommodate?’ (1995, 168–9). I take it that Habermas is also making a vital contribution to our understanding of social democratic normativity as the politicization of needs as he reflects upon the reforms to social and political life that are required to permit particular needs to justify why public resources should be allocated to them (Habermas, 1992).

As an offered measure of our historical progress, the ambition to generalize and institutionalize the ‘politicization of needs’ does not jettison, nor does it simply invert, the classical liberal idealization of the private individual who is bent upon determining his or her own futures. Instead it radically democratizes and concretizes this aspiration reconstructing it as the grounds upon which individuals located in contexts grasp their reliance upon and common grounds with others as they go about putting in place the practical conditions for their freedoms. We might, with Maria Markus, see in the cultural and political histories of modern feminism an illustration of how these self-interpreted needs can reach beyond their local contexts as they seek to establish their society-wide significance and reflect upon the institutional reforms that are demanded by their search for satisfaction. The flight of the Owl of Minerva in the neo-liberal era, allows us to grasp with greater clarity the normative significance of the politicization of needs that languished as the radical promise of the social democratic project. However, if a social democratic project is to be affirmed as an appropriation of a critical humanist tradition that repudiates abstractly philosophical legacies and embraces concrete, living humanity as the measure, this, György Markus would insist, must be grasped as an historical choice to be made by us.

While he is clear that there are no sharp boundaries between Marx’s several uses of the concept, Markus delineates a second ‘emancipatory’ meaning of ideology and its critique. Here, Marx refers to ideological thinking as sets of ideas and ways of thinking that are designed to produce ‘paradigmatic closures of discourse and representation’. This blocking must be critically overcome in order to free the way for representations of a different organization of social practices, of other futures and alternative historical possibilities. In particular, ideological reasoning helps to make sense of, and so reconcile us to, conditions of inequality and exploitation as it transforms ‘historically conditioned structural constraints of social activities into untranscendable limits of thought and imagination’ (Markus, 2011, 463). Marx determines that this ‘making sense’ is not assigned by ‘fixed doctrines’. It is the direct outcome of the categories through which life activities are experienced. Ideological thinking is a creative supply of answers to problems raised by, and conflicts emerging from, ways of understanding and living the exploitations and alienations of life in capitalist societies (Markus, 2011, 459).

Critique of ideology cannot merely target the validity of neo-liberal doctrines that are pumped out by the ‘think tanks’ and are absorbed as the self-consciousness of its policy agendas. It is also called upon to demonstrate how external determinations of social conditions are rendered ‘reflexively, and ultimately practically, untranscendable’ by the terms in which they are lived (Markus, 2011, 459). The emancipatory interests of ideology critique challenges paradigmatic closures ‘to free the way for the idea of a different form of organization of social practices, of an other future as alternative historical possibility’ (Markus, 2011, 463, emphasis in original).

From Foucault we learn that neo-liberalism partly marketed its turn against classical liberalism as a problem-solving responsiveness to the overburdening of the autonomous self. Neo-liberalism’s privatizing imperatives and competitive logic distributes losses, costs and damages in an, apparently, random configuration of accidental winners and losers. At the same time, it offers itself as an adaptable ideological framework that has us reconciled to the unequal distribution of life chances as the-way-of-the-world and as a justice, of sorts. There are no guarantees and no free rides, however, needy selves are to be skilled up to self-sufficiency and the disadvantaged are to seize every opportunity to become winners. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello offer an extended sociological meditation on the distinctiveness of neo-liberalism as a problem-solving that siphons off protest by reappropriating potentially critical ideas as its own (2005). When it turns against the imperatives of laissez-faire liberalism, this ‘new spirit of capitalism’ takes on board the communitarian reservations that had challenged old liberalism, safely installing the vulnerable, over-burdened individual as a contributor to the entrepreneurial energies of the work team. A critique that targets the loss of solidarities is sidestepped while we learn again to tolerate structural inequalities and blocked life chances as the incentives that draw us further into the competitive game.

If ideological thinking is a practice of creatively responding to problems that effectively shuts down critical alternatives, then ideology critique must ferret out and exploit its particular weak spots and vulnerabilities. We have identified main techniques through which neo-liberalism reproduces tolerance for systemic inequalities and for the loss of institutional social protections against hardship and disadvantage. We have noted the apparent efficacy of its programmatic skilling up, coaching and psychological resourcing of those who have fallen by the wayside. This unites with a ‘new spirit’ that confirms that the fate of the individual is tied to his/her contributions to the team effort. Neo-liberalism asks a great deal from these lines of defence and ideology critique can make some ground by diagnosing the strains. We have already referred to the rise of right-wing populisms as, in part, the frustrated response by populations that had been assured of a secure position within the market (Berezin, 2009). The radicalism of neo-liberalism’s expanding dependence on finance capital as the engine of wealth creation meant that the promises that all might be equipped as effective players in the economic game unraveled over time. The casualties formed into angry solidarities in search of a target. Habermas has called right-wing populism a ‘secondary cancer’, sheeting the responsibility home to a failing neo-liberalism. However, if we bring into view the net impacts of this ‘revolt against neo-liberalism’ it might appear to be also functioning as a second line of defence. What comes into sight is a new caveat that nothing of the original undertaking is betrayed by installing a raft of protectionist policies that confirm that the promise that everyone should be equipped to play in the economic game was never intended as a principled universalism.

Concluding remarks

Markus concludes his essays on the topic with a skeptical reflection on the contemporary relevance of a Marxist account of ideology critique. Marx’s ideology critique partly repudiates the legitimations of a ‘type of society’ and its power arrangements that are carried by, and concealed within, ‘anthropological generalities’. However, Markus observes that Marx’s ideology critique is trapped by its critical purposes into also proposing a normativity that feeds off abstract universals (Markus, 2011, 497). After all, a humanistic ‘measure of man’ needs to match the abstracted character of the ideological version of historical progress that it challenges. In the end, though, we don’t need to be entirely caught by this tension between the logical entailment of abstract universals needed to underpin Marx’s ideology-critical purposes and his own ‘strong historicism’. We were able to use an account of the tasks of ideology critique to indicate a way through this vexed problem. Investigating how a social democratic project might rise to the tasks of ideology critique caused us to attempt to rehabilitate and make explicit its humanist core. The idealizations of the ‘politicization of needs’ was seen to claim the normative power of a critical and democratic humanism that does not call upon any philosophies of history or purely anthropological generalities. There are no guarantees or certainties to be had, just an insistence that the matter of the future is not settled and that we can still wager on a historicizing humanism to offer us the best measure by which to choose our potentials.

Horkheimer, joint author to Dialectic of Enlightenment, could have told us that a scientistic drive to assert ‘man as the measure’ would leave us contemplating the consequences of a humanized world frozen in terror. By contrast, a humanism that is formed in the crucible of a ‘politicisation of needs’ dwells with the damaging results. This standpoint measures progress by its effects on concrete lives and by the capacity of our institutions to permit a plurality of needs to seek to establish why their claims upon shared resources should be met.