Abstract
In recent years, progressives have reclaimed freedom as a political value. Once the exclusive brand of market libertarians and a conservative foreign policy establishment, freedom now echoes powerfully on the Left, from the mainstream of the Democratic party to more radical projects of emancipation. While other key concepts in American political discourse have been subject to similar changes in valence – consider the journey of equality as a left, then right, then left again political project 1 – freedom presents particular challenges as it is strongly associated with neoliberalism (Brown, 2015, 2019). Accordingly, any effort to articulate freedom as a progressive political value must come to terms with the rootedness of the concept in neoliberal ideas of market freedom. This in turn implies that what is required is not only engagement with the collective forms of freedom that are typically quite palatable to progressives (e.g. Gourevitch and Robin, 2020; Rana, 2023; Taylor, 2017), but also with more troublesome notions of individual freedom, particularly those embedded in the much maligned anti-discrimination project (e.g. Spade, 2011).
In order to explore the Left’s emergent politics of freedom, I want to start from a problem that I have encountered in my own work, and then build from this to a broader set of considerations about the future direction of critical sociology. My current book project traces the long history of the individualization of risk in American society, seeking to understand how it is that we have moved from understanding risk as intrinsically a property of groups – a problem, that is, to be managed collectively – to thinking of it as primarily as a matter of one’s own individual weighing of personal cost versus prospective benefit (see Krippner, 2023). We might expect that the individualization of risk is the product of a neoliberal assault on notions of shared responsibility in recent decades – what political scientist Jacob Hacker (2006) famously called the ‘great risk shift’ to refer to the displacement of risk from collective institutions forged in the New Deal to individuals who are increasingly expected to fend for themselves. Instead, my research indicates that this transformation is better understood as the cumulative result of movements for inclusion that sought to gain access to insurance for groups (at different historical moments: African Americans, women, and those infected with HIV/AIDS) who had previously been excluded from markets for risk. When individuals who were refused access to insurance on the basis of group characteristics (e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation) demanded to be treated as ‘individuals’, insurers opportunistically accommodated these demands by developing risk classification schemes that parsed risks ever-more finely. Insurers also responded to demands for individual treatment by emphasizing ‘lifestyle factors’ that could be controlled through behavioral choices: exercise, diet, smoking, alcohol use, driving patterns, and so on. ‘It’s not who you are, but what you do’, insurers affirmed. 2 Notably, these choice-based frameworks did not remain in insurance markets, but migrated to other social institutions, from education, to medicine, to criminal justice (Horan, 2021).
The role of anti-discrimination movements in seeding the individualization of risk in American society is especially evident in the case of feminist contestation of insurers’ risk classification practices beginning in the 1970s (see Krippner, 2023). While insurers insisted on the necessity of using group-based characteristics – in this case, gender classifications – to fairly and accurately price risks, feminists argued that individual outcomes must not be determined on the basis of (stigmatized) group characteristics. ‘It is a most fundamental principle of the American tradition that no individual should be considered simply as part of a racial, sexual, religious, or ethnic group, or treated differently because of his or her membership in that group’, ACLU Lawyer Mary Heen explained. ‘[But] in the context of insurance risk classifications’, she continued, ‘. . . no individual can ever overcome the stereotypes or “averages” of . . . invidious group classifications on the basis of race or sex’. 3 In contesting insurers’ risk classification practices, feminists pointed to the anti-stereotyping principle that suggested that sex-role stereotypes compromised the ability of women (and men) to determine their own freedom of action as individuals who defined themselves outside of membership in groups constituted by gender. As such, feminists argued that insurers ought to ‘treat individuals as individuals, based on personal lifestyles and other causally relevant factors’ and not ‘based only upon the statistical risks presented by his or her sex as a class’. 4 Somewhat paradoxically, feminists became tireless advocates of the individualization of risk.
Here, it is possible to identify the promotion of a key feature of neoliberal capitalism – the embrace of individual responsibility and choice, coded in this instance as freedom from sex-role stereotypes – among putatively progressive social movements. Notably, I am not alone in connecting salient aspects of neoliberalism to political projects on the Left. A number of scholars, disproportionately historians, have described what is sometimes referred to as ‘left neoliberalism’, pointing to sources of antipathy to the state and the strong embrace of market freedom in the New Left, the sixties counterculture, and identity-based social movements (Gerstle, 2022). Instances abound: economic deregulation was a project of the Left before it was a project of the Right, championed by none other than the consumer rights advocate, Ralph Nader (Krippner, 2011; Prasad, 2012; Sabin, 2021; Schiller, 2019); AIDS activists promoted community healthcare or reliance on private insurance markets in response to the AIDS crisis, eroding (even if unavoidably) state-organized social provision (Bell, 2020; Cooper, 2017); feminist demands for the flexibilization of labor markets weakened the family wage at the heart of the postwar Fordist settlement between capital and labor (Fraser, 2009; Streeck, 2011). But does this line of thinking mean that progressive social movements – especially those associated with feminism – are somehow ‘to blame’ for neoliberalism? Quite a few scholars have intimated that perhaps they should be held at least in part responsible, noting paradoxical affinities between identity-based anti-discrimination movements and neoliberal trajectories (e.g. Eisenstein, 2005). 5
In what follows, I want to interrogate this ‘left neoliberalism’ perspective more closely in order to think critically about the politics of freedom articulated on the Left. I will suggest that the ‘left neoliberalism’ perspective offers an important corrective to an overly monolithic view of neoliberalism that sees this tendency as arising seamlessly from the conservative movement (cf. Geismer, 2020: 109). However, ‘left neoliberalism’ can be monolithic in its own way, allowing the sources of neoliberalism to be heterogeneous, but flattening the amalgam they create into a totalized system of market rule. Hence the seemingly paradoxical reminder that what becomes neoliberalism originated from very different political impulses, including political projects aimed at human emancipation. But what if some of these emancipatory impulses are still alive inside the totalizing neoliberal system they form?
In this regard, while it is misleading to simply appropriate feminism for neoliberalism – more or less, how I read the ‘left neoliberalism’ argument in its strongest form – we do have to deal seriously with affinities and convergences that are plainly evident. Put simply, that feminism arrives at something that looks ‘neoliberal’ does not make feminism itself neoliberal. The problem is actually more interesting when approached from the other direction: rather than making feminism neoliberal, might the observed convergence not make neoliberalism at least a little bit feminist? What I mean to suggest here is that rather than assuming that the original aspiration of an emancipatory movement is somehow contaminated when it converges on another political project that turns out to be not so emancipatory, we might ask not what this signals about the inadequacies and limitations of the feminist political imagination, but instead what this convergence tells us about neoliberal desires and agencies. Furthermore, we might ask how those desires and agencies might be reconstructed to recover the feminist aspiration contained within them. 6
The best way into these questions is to engage what I consider to be the most compelling version of the ‘left neoliberalism’ argument. This in my view is a recent law review article by legal historian Deborah Dinner (2017) in which she explores the convergences between employment discrimination law embedded in Title VII and neoliberalism. What makes this piece exemplary is that Dinner goes beyond merely noting the fact that there is a paradoxical affinity between anti-discrimination law and neoliberalism – which Dinner describes in terms of their shared affirmation of individual freedoms, efficient markets, and ‘negative’ rights – to suggest that there may in fact be a causal connection between the two. The argument is complex and I cannot do it full justice here, but essentially what Dinner suggests is that feminists positioned Title VII against protective labor legislation that limited women’s hours and working conditions, and in doing so paved the way for the ascendence of the individual rights paradigm in employment – the hallmark, arguably, of neoliberalism. What was lost in this evolution, she argues, was the possibility of universal social protection – that is, the notion that rather than stripping labor protections from women, labor protections might have been extended to men. A more capacious understanding of anti-discrimination was thereby foreclosed, preparing the ground for the neoliberal revolution.
I have no quibble with Dinner’s causal argument which seems right on point to me. Where I take issue with Dinner’s account is her use of this causal argument to read the tenets of neoliberalism back into the underlying premises of feminism, emphasizing in particular the latter’s embrace of ‘individual freedoms’. Dinner’s interrogation here focuses on the anti-stereotyping principle that is foregrounded in civil rights law, which she invokes to suggest that feminist mobilization was undergirded by an individualist conception that led feminists straight into the arms of neoliberals. Dinner’s argument, in essence, is that in battling ‘sex-role stereotypes’, women demanded to be treated as ‘individuals’, opening the door to market fundamentalism. Dinner (2017: 1101–1102; emphasis added) writes,
Anti-stereotyping theory reinforces neoliberal conceptions of the archetypical legal subject, injury, and remedy. The neoliberal subject is the autonomous individual acting without constraints in the marketplace; artificial restraints on such action constitute injury; and the actor’s unfettering is an ideal remedy. By locating individual freedom as the core function of anti-discrimination law, anti-stereotyping similarly frames inequality as a problem of constraint on individual agency.
Here is a key slippage that is made throughout the literature on neoliberalism, a conflation between individual autonomy and self-definition, on the one side, and the logic of market rule, on the other. 7 It is worth considering where this conflation originates and what it signifies. Yes, markets rely on individuals who are ‘autonomous’ in the sense of exercising some form of consumer sovereignty, but this hardly seems to describe the kind of autonomy that feminists sought in demanding that their life choices not be pre-scripted by assigned gender roles. Why should the desire to define one’s identity and locate one’s social experience outside of the constraints defined by the category gender (or at least to engage that category on one’s own terms) be equated to ‘the autonomous individual acting without constraints in the marketplace’ – as though the marketplace is obviously the context in which autonomous individuals exercise their agency? Dinner’s formulation makes clear that the ‘left neoliberal’ critique of anti-discrimination law cannot conceive of individual freedom outside of the market, and it also cannot conceive of autonomous individuals as something other than atomized individuals. 8
But this mischaracterizes the anti-stereotyping principle articulated by feminists, as legal scholar Cary Franklin (2010) shows in her brilliant reconstruction of the jurisprudence of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, arguably the most important architect of the anti-stereotyping principle in American law. Rather than a narrow, formalistic conception of equality, the anti-stereotyping principle can be seen as more expansive than is typically considered: aimed at dismantling gender as a system that confines how both men and women live their lives, containing personhood within a narrow horizon of gendered performance. 9 Accordingly, the objective of the anti-stereotyping principle is not to unleash the neoliberal subject who engages in ‘free’ exchange in the marketplace, the apex of atomized individuation, but rather to allow space for a process of self-definition realized in concert with others who are also seeking self-definition. That is, the anti-stereotyping principle is not concerned with the freedom to valorize one’s human capital in the market (a narrow form of self-realization), but rather is directed toward the freedom to craft a self, unconstrained by larger structures that would restrict possible paths to personhood. 10 In this regard, we might imagine the culmination of the anti-stereotyping principle not as the neoliberal subject at all, but as the transgender subject who refuses the confines of the gender binary and seeks to construct communities that affirm one’s person unmarked by gender difference (or alternatively, marked according to one’s own choices about how to navigate the shifting terrain of gender identity).
In this regard, there may be an even more transformative project contained in the anti-stereotyping principle than the simple deconstruction of ‘male’ and ‘female’ social roles. Rather than offering the ‘genderless utopia’ envisioned by second-wave feminism, we can see the anti-stereotyping principle as instead enabling the proliferation of genders – that is, an embrace rather than rejection of gendered social forms that moves toward decoupling the lived experience of gender from the sexed body (Meadow, 2018: 224–225). Here my argument draws on Paisley Currah’s (2022) fascinating new book, Sex Is as Sex Does, which offers an illuminating way of thinking about the relationship between anti-discrimination projects and more ‘radical’ gender politics. While anti-discrimination is often considered by left critics as an inherently conservative form of politics, necessarily individualizing and self-limiting, Currah considers the state’s involvement in making and enforcing rules about sex classification as a technology of distribution. Seen from this vantage point, anti-discrimination laws operate to ‘decommission’ gender as an important mechanism of state distribution (Currah, 2022: 147), effectively lowering the stakes around the gender binary, allowing for its erosion in some contexts, and greater latitude to creatively innovate around it in others. In other words, once gender is no longer the basis on which important social goods (credit, housing, employment, and so on) are distributed, there is much less reason to rely on strictly enforced traditional gender norms as a form of social regulation. In this regard, anti-discrimination is not an inherently conservative strategy that necessarily legitimates institutions that reproduce inequality (as many have argued), but in fact contains within it the potential to deeply disrupt and reconfigure existing social arrangements in ways that can be emancipatory.
Dinner (2017) concludes her article by observing that as neoliberalism ‘includes a commitment to . . . the unraveling of race and gender stereotypes’ it may not be ‘all bad’ (p. 1118). But from the vantage point considered here, we might say instead that insofar as it is committed to the unraveling of race and gender stereotypes, neoliberalism may not be ‘all neoliberal’. That is, as the literature on ‘left neoliberalism’ clearly demonstrates, neoliberalism contains elements that are not native to it but come from other political strains. What that literature does not demonstrate as clearly is that these foreign elements may meld into the market shape imperfectly, if they meld at all, even as they are incorporated within neoliberalism. This raises some important questions: Is it possible to recover the emancipatory intuition of anti-discrimination law – now carried inside neoliberal logics – and reground it in once again in feminism, anti-racism, and the struggle for LGBTQ rights (alongside other emancipatory projects)? And might this project of recovery provide valuable insights into the remarkable durability of neoliberalism, which may owe its appeal less to any innate attachment to the market (and its putative efficiencies) than it does to a (presumably universal) human desire for emancipation? And finally, were this desire for emancipation to find fuller expression in non-market sites (a possibility that the conventional equation of individual freedom with the market renders almost unthinkable) might this not erode neoliberalism from within, rendering the neoliberal project far less robust? These still unanswered questions suggest the importance of theorizing individual freedoms apart from the market economy as a key legacy of feminism’s anti-discrimination struggle, and a crucial task for critical social theory today.
