Wolfgang Streeck on consumption,depoliticisation and neoliberal capitalism

Understanding demand, theorising depoliticisation

Over roughly the last decade, Wolfgang Streeck has endeavoured to move beyond what he views as excessively blinkered accounts of capitalism’s historical emergence and likely trajectory. Streeck’s most influential work remains Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2014), originally published in German in 2013. This unsparing critique of contemporary capitalism, which grew out of Streeck’s 2012 Adorno Lectures at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, is an attempt to think with and beyond the 1970s Frankfurt School crisis theory of ‘late capitalism’, as represented most famously by Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe. The arguments in Buying Time are themselves supplemented and extended in the essays collected together in How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (2016), built out of material presented, published and newly written between 2011 and 2015, and one benefits greatly from reading the two books together.

Generalising outward from observations about the political economy of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states more generally, Streeck believes we need to bring capitalism’s cross-contextual dynamism, or ‘Eigendynamik’ (Streeck, 2016, pp. 57–58, 229), back into focus in contemporary social theory so that capitalism’s potential destructiveness can be properly appreciated. This argument is embedded within a broader historical crisis narrative in which a revolt of capital against post-1945 social democracy over the 1970s led, from the 1980s, into a series of increasingly untenable political-economic improvisations that Streeck associates with neoliberalism.

Lodged within this larger historical narrative, one can discern various interesting subplots that centre on the theme of consumption, allowing Streeck to portray neoliberal reform since the 1970s as a ‘neoliberal social project dressed up as a consumption project’ (Streeck, 2014, p. 4). This dimension of Streeck’s work, which has so far escaped critical scrutiny, should be interrogated, as by means of it Streeck seeks to explain how neoliberal reforms have been legitimated. I begin by explaining what role consumerism plays in Streeck’s general crisis theory of neoliberal capitalism, while also clarifying how neoliberalism itself is understood within this theory. The next section brings together Streeck’s main arguments about the historical development of consumerism. In the following section, I then argue that Streeck’s claims are historically reductive on a number of grounds. This is followed by a section in which I argue that there nonetheless is good reason for causally tying consumption to the legitimation of observable processes of neoliberalisation within the OECD world from the 1970s, but in order to see this we need to move out in very different analytical directions. Doing so does not lead to a loss of critical purchase on the subject of consumption, but does redirect critical attention toward new objects. These arguments will be brought together in a brief concluding section.

Consumerism and legitimation

Before seeking to understand how Streeck links consumption to neoliberal reform, we should consider why he might wish to do so at all. Otherwise put, we need to ask: what kind of work do Streeck’s forays into the nature of modern consumption do within his more general crisis theory? And given that this crisis theory is itself built up around a discussion of the historical emergence of neoliberalism, we should also consider what neoliberalism refers to.

Without entering deeply into the many existing debates around neoliberalism, it is worth clarifying that some of the best work on the subject has emerged through research on the ‘neoliberal thought collective’. Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe and Quinn Slobodian, among others, have developed many historically sophisticated studies of this group and its inter-communicating factions, which first came together well before the 1970s. ¹ This research has helped to show up many of the reifications and over-generalisations that still persistently surface in a range of macro-level institutional accounts of neoliberalism by Streeck and many other leading critical social theorists. That said, both modes of analysis discussed here can be partially reconciled. ²

The more common institutional approaches all point to processes of neoliberal reform in which the expanded commodification of social life is central, with Karl Polanyi’s work being one particularly prominent source of inspiration for Streeck and many others. There is often value in this, as long as we read such work as ultimately formulating accounts of neoliberalisation flying at a high level of generalisation that are better for starting academic conversations than for ending them. When Streeck speaks of neoliberalism, he seeks above all to designate a marked institutional reversal away from a sociopolitical condition in which markets are highly regulated and the wealth generated on them is widely redistributed along roughly egalitarian lines. In stripped-down conceptual terms, we can follow Streeck’s basic approach and argue that neoliberalisation, whatever else we choose to associate with it, designates an attempt to radically marketise the polity in both these ways, and one that has undeniably met with a significant deal of historical success in the OECD countries from around the 1970s.

A multitude of important historical questions are, however, left hanging by this minimal conceptual approach, of which two are particularly significant. The first is the problem of understanding what authoritative resources have been mobilised to promote marketisation. In practice, addressing this problem opens up further questions about whether or to what extent states and state-appointed authorities have retained control of this transformative process and whether market deregulation and welfare retrenchment have been as absolute and pervasive as many critical scholars believe. The second problem concerns which social groups or sociological conditions have provided the conceptual and legitimatory foundations for effecting this change. Here depoliticisation is one major issue, with neoliberal thought and advocacy frequently also seeking out ways to depoliticise the demos, while the question of their actual successes also should remain an empirical one. Streeck’s various views on both of these historical problems are, to my mind, always provocative but also frequently misleading. In what follows, however, I focus most on questioning how persuasive Streeck is when handling the second problem.

With this in mind, we are in a better position to see why Streeck addresses the question of consumption at all. At one level, Streeck’s interest in consumption appears to grow out of his broader understanding of the unfinished tasks of social theory in the twenty-first century. Streeck has argued that one on-going weakness of social theory has been its tendency to focus excessively on the supply side of the economy, while remaining hazy about how the demand side operates (Beckert & Streeck, 2008, pp. 19–20; Streeck, 2016, p. 210). Despite some advances in the immediate post-war period, Streeck believes that today we still lack a full appreciation of ‘the epochal significance of the rise of consumerism’ (Streeck, 2016, p. 210).

More importantly, however, Streeck is responding to a problem arising out of his own attempt at resuscitating a crisis theory of capitalism suited to our times. The basic point of departure for Buying Time was to find answers to the question of why the legitimation crisis of post-war social democracy ultimately failed to assume an emancipatory form. Streeck’s understanding of legitimation becomes important here. In this regard, Streeck (in Crouch, De la Porta, & Streeck, 2016, pp. 505) has raised the question of ‘whether the production of legitimacy in our democracies is still mainly achieved by the political system, or whether it has moved somewhere else’. He immediately goes on to answer to his own question: ‘Here consumerism becomes crucial, which in my view implies a sort of emasculation of politics as the satisfaction of needs and aspirations has moved to consumer markets’. More generally, when seeking to understand what cleared the ground for the marketisiation of the polity at the level of everyday life, Streeck’s basic answer is that we should look toward the depoliticisation of the demos, while arguing that this is itself an outgrowth of a new popular ‘consumerist’ sensibility or ethos taking root in the OECD countries over the 1970s.

Post-Fordist production, individualised consumer demand and depoliticisation

With this background in mind, we can ask whether Streeck’s various attempts at tracing the marketisation of the polity back to a consumer-driven mode of depoliticisation are persuasive. A first step here is to reconstruct Streeck’s scattered observations on how consumerism emerged, which build up from a discussion of post-war changes in Fordist production. Leaning on Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel’s controversial but influential The Second Industrial Divide (1984), Streeck focuses on a slew of developments occurring in the highly industrialised societies of the 1970s. Of foremost significance among these was that labour processes were increasingly automated in a manner that lowered production turnover times while increasing product diversification. This had not been anticipated by the Frankfurt School crisis theorists and was particularly significant for the turn to what Piore and Sabel famously referred to as ‘flexible specialization’, ³ taking us beyond Fordist mass production as we know it and replacing it with a type of rapid, customised production for consumer goods that more speedily met consumer desires. The rising consumption that came of this and of the accelerated post-Fordist production cycle, Streeck argues, played a vital economic role in the renewed wave of capital accumulation that spurred on the advanced industrial North’s transition from the ‘saturated’ markets of the 1970s to the ‘affluent’ markets that followed from the 1980s. ⁴

The extent to which this turn away from mass production to a new form of craft production accurately describes historical reality was left open by Piore and Sabel, who were generalising from a limited set of empirical cases, and has remained disputed ever since. For the sake of argument, however, we can assume that this sweeping narrative does more or less hold up. Where this story arguably becomes most interesting, even if still pinned down to the unquestioned functionalism that saturates most critical accounts of consumption, ⁵ is Streeck’s (2016, p. 99) suggestion that post-Fordist production was able to overcome the crisis of accumulation of the times by harnessing the force of individualisation, with non-standardised goods serving to satisfy and further nourish increasingly individualised desires. When speaking of this individualisation, Streeck argues that the collapse of traditional community structures in the 1970s and 1980s – by which he chiefly means the family, neighbourhood and nation – meant that people increasingly associated on the grounds of shared consumer choices, which were comparatively far less binding as sources of common identities. ⁶

At the same time, this opens up a fundamental ambiguity in the historiographical logic underlying Streeck’s writing about consumption, which he never confronts head-on. On the one hand, keeping with his insistence on there being a capitalist Eigendynamik underlying the neoliberal turn in the 1970s, Streeck apparently must stress something in the very makeup of capitalism as the prime historical mover in the crisis narrative he wishes to tell, and he never doubts that this itself must lie in the sphere of commodity production. He simply disagrees with the Frankfurt crisis theory of the 1970s about precisely where to locate this ultimate cause: not in a revolt of labour over the redistribution of profit and conditions of employment, but rather a revolt of capital in order to further expand and hoard profit and to keep labour from making excessive demands. On the other hand, opening the analysis up to processes of individualisation seems to suggest the possibility that a Weberian-style elective affinity is at work here.

I will return to these questions of historical causality again below, but here we can note that, for Streeck, the new sense of liberation that came of the consumer-driven collapse of community is ironic or paradoxical, as the developments underlying it in fact undermined freedom in three main ways. ⁷ First, in the domain of production, the salience of consumer identities compelled workers, who had begun to chafe at Fordist discipline, to fall into line again. This was just the opposite of what Daniel Bell long ago, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), predicted expanding market consumption would do. While his observations remain purely speculative, Streeck may well be right to argue that Bell failed to understand that a disinclination to submit to the disciplinary burdens of labour would mean certain loss in the increasingly competitive sphere of consumption.

Second, these developments steered the wealthy countries into the direction of vastly increased reliance on private credit. Available on generous terms from the 1990s, credit was there for private consumers to maintain their lifestyles even as welfare spending contracted, wages stagnated or declined and employee benefits grew scarcer. Streeck views this second development as particularly portentous insofar as toxic mortgage credit catalysed the 2008 crisis. Yet he does not discuss these connections much and, problematically, does not properly sift credit-based spending on consumer luxuries from spending on such things as healthcare and other vital services. Likewise, Streeck never distinguishes between the very different sociopolitical dynamics that have consistently emerged around competitive individual consumption, on the one hand, and solidaristic consumer-side struggles for state provision of basic goods on the other, while also seeming indifferent to the continuously expanding literature in which all this has been discussed.

At any rate, a third consequence of post-Fordism and rising individualism, for Streeck, is that once-vital political coalitions also slowly bled out of life as people began, en masse, to trade in their political identities as citizens for consumer or ‘customer’ identities, with state service providers responding to this sweeping change by restructuring public services into the market-mimicking form of public administration often referred to as ‘new public management’. This third, political loss is what most consistently interests Streeck, who touches on it in many places and who takes it as his focus in the essay ‘Citizens as Customers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption’ (Streeck, 2016). Streeck argues, though with heavy recourse to anecdote and received critical canards rather than historically grounded research on the subject, that the post-Fordist structure of individualised consumer demand has massively undermined demand for public goods and popular fidelity to the state as an egalitarian service provider, opening the gate wide to neoliberal reform and the inequalities and heightened risks that have come of it. Although not employing this terminology himself, what Streeck describes in such places is best thought of as a qualitatively new ethos that swept through the entire OECD world from the 1970s, just as the institutional reconfigurations of neoliberal capitalism were also appearing. At this point, however, one has to ask: how convincing is this historical narrative of consumer-driven depoliticisation?

Depoliticisation as a complex phenomenon

There are at the very least five large-scale historical trends that can be invoked to explain the depoliticisation that accompanied the neoliberal turn Streeck describes: first, the emergence of accelerated and personalised forms of consumer satisfaction facilitated by the adjustments to demand accompanying post-Fordist production; second, the social individualisation accompanying the erosion of conventional family and community structures; third, rising generalised affluence; fourth, the decline of the labour movement and the political solidarities forged there; and fifth, the decline of the mass party as a vehicle for broad-based and sustained political mobilisation. Most of these in fact surface, at least marginally, in Streeck’s own writing but, as we have seen above, Streeck appears to put neoliberal-era depoliticisation down to some unspecified combination of the first two historical trends, as mediated through a new consumerist ethos. In so doing, Streeck abstracts out an enormous amount of historical complexity in ways that should invite scepticism.

We have considered the first trend at length above and conceded for the sake of argument that Streeck’s portrayal of the post-Fordist transition roughly corresponds to broad trends in industrial innovation and organisation throughout the OECD world from around the early 1970s. There we also saw that drawing the second trend into the picture creates a new level of complexity: it is never clear how much independent explanatory weight Streeck assigns individualism in the emergence of mass consumption. But the problems with Streeck’s account do not end there. Paying more attention than Streeck does to each of the other three trends – rising affluence, contracting labour solidarities and the exodus out of mass parties – further calls into question his economistic argument that the depoliticisation emerging around the 1970s must be causally traced back to changes in consumer behaviour. After looking at each of these three trends in more detail below, I will also look at the nature of post-1970s depoliticisation itself and argue that, when taking all of these depoliticising forces into account, and when paying more attention to all sorts of complexities that Streeck overlooks, we also see that depoliticisation from the 1970s has been neither as absolute nor as linear as Streeck generally assumes.

When considering what is missing from Streeck’s account of consumer-driven depoliticisation, a good place to start is with the third trend listed above, that is, steeply rising affluence. Influential early attempts at throwing a conceptual hoop around the large-scale social and political significance of increasing material abundance included the ‘repressive desublimation’ thesis of Herbert Marcuse (itself entangled with similar theses by Marcuse’s early Frankfurt School colleagues) and the broadly similar embourgeoisement thesis of Ferdynand Zweig, each positing a causal relationship between increased post-war affluence and declining working-class consciousness and political and civic activism. While both very interesting, it was, however, always unclear how the former checked out against historical reality, being based considerably more on philosophical assertion and what appears in retrospect a to be a highly totalising mode of ideology critique than on attentive sociological questioning. The latter, by contrast, touched off a few decades of compelling but entirely inconclusive disputes in class theory, with the plurality of research methods and highly focussed empirical findings meaning that researchers could simply never agree on how to generalise from their findings.

Some, of course, will still wish to insist in the absence of strong evidence either way that rising consumer standards simply must be what chiefly explains sinking political involvement. ⁸ For all its evidential weakness, this has, after all, been a common claim in much critical social theory. Yet, even conceding the point, placing the original debates on the subject in their times also invites us to shift our attention to sweeping macro-level political-economic changes prior to the post-Fordist productive restructuring that Streeck has made so much of. Principally: the spectacular post-war rises in employment and industrial productivity, themselves rendered sustainable by the welfare state redistribution that helped to make spending on new consumer luxuries more viable on a large scale than at any prior point in history in virtue of massively freeing up income for it, while more generally helping to keep the wheels of commerce in motion.

If we now consider the decline of labour-based politics – the fourth depoliticising trend mentioned above – here too a broadly economistic approach to depoliticisation can certainly also offer something. Streeck, when articulating his broader crisis theory, and building on a long and impressive career in which research on labour movements has played a significant part, often alludes to the main events here in passing. These include the throttling of union power and strike action, the division of working class solidarity through workers coming to compete among themselves for ever scarcer labour benefits and real wage increases, and the shift to flexible and precarious labour conditions. Were Streeck to have related such observations back to his thesis of consumer-driven depoliticisation, he might have found another reason for preferring a less mono-causal approach to depoliticisation. These consequential changes came about as a result of power struggles in the domain of production itself, though originally with capitalists making common cause with conservative politicians riding the social backlash to the New Left’s post-war advances, and do not require a thesis about a new consumerist subjectivity in order to be understood.

The fifth depoliticising trajectory mentioned above, the decline of the mass party, is important too. The slump in labour activism and mass party affiliation are clearly related to one another, but they are not identical. Workers’ movements had, by the 1880s, begun on the path towards producing the mass parties that we recognise today. The model was later adopted by conservatives and liberals, coming info full force only after the world wars, while National Socialists and fascists were earlier adopters (Wagner, 1994, p. 92). Streeck (2016, pp. 110–111; 2020) has little to say about how all this came unstuck but clearly endorses Peter Mair’s influential narrative of depoliticisation in Ruling the Void (2013), which recounts how the post-war mass political party went into decline over the 1980s. Yet here Streeck again does not make the connection back to his own thesis on the consumption–depoliticisation relationship. All the same, when considering the evolution of political parties away from the concerns of their bases and into cartel-like bodies, due to pressures like state-allocated party funding and the perceived narrowing of policymaking ability in the context of globalisation and the formation of regionally regulating regimes like the EU (Katz & Mair, 2009; Mair, 2013), we have another potentially excellent explanation for depoliticisation.

Which of the trends discussed above, which for reasons of space I have only sketched out very incompletely, as well as others possibly overlooked here, carry the most explanatory weight when accounting for depoliticisation remains an open question. And, when approaching this question, there is also no a priori reason why the answer should be generalisable across all capitalist, OECD or even EU societies, which in principle may have their own path-dependent institutional dynamics. Given all this, I believe that what we really have with Streeck’s thesis on consumption as a depoliticising historical force is a series of interesting but very thinly substantiated claims that should be converted back into material for hypotheses concerning the depoliticisation of the demos in capitalist societies. Such hypotheses would, however, need to be further refined and researched before coming at all close to providing an explanation of large-scale historical change in which some minimal attempt to sift correlation from cause can be discerned.

When reading these trends back into our understanding of the historical roots of depoliticisation, it is also important to see that the overall nature of post-war depoliticisation itself is vastly more complex and less linear than Streeck generally allows. On the left, many of the social movements of the late 1960s and the 1970s, in part responding to recent experiences of fascism and totalitarianism and to on-going war, turned toward goals of self-realisation in various forms, which in many cases led to an abandonment of longer standing and more collective aims of labour and political reform without themselves eventuating in new, viable forms of collective political action (Wagner, 2002). At the same time, there has also been a shifting of political energies into smaller movements, frequently organised outside, or on the margins of, conventional political-party and labour mobilisation. We see the proliferation around this time of diffuse struggles for the recognition of racial, gender and other forms of social difference, as well as smaller, individual rights-based mobilisations and single-issue politics, the latter often expressed in a rise in legal litigation rather than broad-based political mobilisation (Taylor, 1991, 1992). We also see a multitude of forms of consumer activism growing or taking off after the wars: not only boycotts, but more significantly, urban-level struggles around what can be called ‘collective consumption’ (a term popularised by Manuel Castells in the 1980s) of state-provided goods and services based on collective legal entitlement and egalitarian ideals. At the same time, the more individualistic and culturalist forms of leftist counter-cultural critique were already, from around the late 1970s, beginning to be appropriated on the right. There we see the development of a sort of mystique of small-scale civic involvement, often in response to perceived cultural threats from the left (Rodgers, 2011, pp. 195–196).

Depoliticisation has therefore been far from absolute. All the same, there most certainly has been a statistically visible average decline in electoral participation in most of the OECD countries from the 1970s, even if countries where voting is compulsory or enforced by sanctions against non-voters for all or part of the population are partial exceptions, and notwithstanding a fair amount of volatility in the overall data when disaggregated (Mair, 2013, pp. 35–39; Schäfer & Streeck, 2013, pp. 10–12). Streeck is remarkably fatalistic about this in his writing up to 2016, where some hope for a politically driven domestication of neoliberal capitalism is expressed but where the generally prevailing view is pure pessimism. Rolling back neoliberalisation, after all, assumes ‘a degree of political control over our common fate of which we cannot even dream after the destruction of collective agency, and indeed the hope for it, in the neoliberal-globalist revolution’ (Streeck, 2016, p. 57).

This pessimism seems attributable to Streeck’s tendency simply to ignore or dismiss most forms of struggle on both the left and right prior to 2008 that weren’t rooted in conventional labour and party platforms. In much of his post-2016 writing (especially Streeck, 2017, 2021), however, Streeck has begun to retrospectively notice shifts in electoral politics that do not fit this picture, while also beginning, at least partially, to come alive to the presence of mobilisations beyond, or cutting across, the fields of organised labour and party politics.

Streeck has increasingly turned to considering what he discusses in terms like ‘grassroots plebeian-popular counter-movements’, often preferring to avoid the term ‘populism’ while (very problematically) conceptually drawing both left and right forms of mobilisation into one large tent of antiglobalist and/or pro-democracy struggle (Streeck, 2021: 18%). For our purposes here, what is noteworthy is that, when now considering the political rise of these movements, Streeck again fails to reflect back on the claims in his earlier work about the causes of depoliticisation. Given that all the main causes of depoliticisation he identifies there remain with us, and yet political participation both in the electoral and non-electoral spheres is rising, another apparently serious problem has been left unattended.

Consumer ideals in the neoliberal reform of public administrations and trade regimes

I have so far reconstructed an argument in Streeck’s crisis theory in which (1) a new consumerist ethos suffusing the everyday life of the OECD societies from the 1970s (2) led to a sweeping depoliticisation of the demos, with the further knock-on effect that (3) the neoliberal marketisation of the polity found popular support and met with no meaningful political resistance. While I have argued that there are strong reasons for finding this general narrative highly question-begging at best, there is nonetheless an essential connection between consumption and neoliberalisation that Streeck entirely overlooks, and in what follows I will trace out some of its most salient features. To notice it, however, we need to shift the focus away from pure speculation about popular sentiment, however interesting it may be, and onto historically emergent ‘policy paradigms’ (Hall, 1993, pp. 279–280) grounded in the more clearly observable social and political practices of members of elite ‘epistemic communities’ (that is, ‘networks of knowledge-based experts’) (Haas, 1992, p. 2). Shifts in policy paradigms can be authoritatively imposed through sudden reforms, but can also proceed in a more subterranean and drawn-out fashion, through slowly accreted ‘norm substitution’ (Kentikelenis & Babb, 2019, p. 1722), or indeed some combination of both.

What is most important, for the purposes of this discussion, is how members of influential epistemic communities have consistently invoked ideals of consumer order as a legitimatory instrument enabling them to expand the institutionalised domain of market or market-mimicking order. This is particularly apparent in two domains of practice in which the most architectonic neoliberal reforms within the OECD countries can be seen: the restructuring of public administrations and the regulation of domestic and international trade.

The nature of public administration has altered throughout most of the OECD societies since around the early 1980s, a change that is often discussed with reference to the emergence of so-called ‘new public management’ (NPM) (Hood, 1991). When writing about consumption and depoliticisation, as described above, Streeck mentions NPM, albeit entirely in passing, as one of the main institutional outcomes of the altered structure of post-Fordist consumer desire, in which we see the ethos of citizenship transmuted into one of ‘customership’. But, to whatever degree new patterns of consumer desire evenly engulfing entire populations might really explain this change, there is also a considerably more complex conceptual history that can be told about NPM’s origins and effects, the bare bones of which I hope to lay out here.

The institutional arrangements associated with NPM reforms have differed slightly between societies, but the epistemic core of NPM wherever it has emerged is that public sectors come to be run like consumer-facing firms, driven by principles of efficiency and the promotion of consumer choice/’sovereignty’ (Aberbach & Christensen, 2005, p. 226). NPM reform seeks to institute, above all, what UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategic Unit (quoted in Stedman Jones, 2018, p. 169) called, in 2006, a ‘public service characterised by competition and contestability on the supply side and by user choice and voice on the demand side’.

The supply-side justifications for such reform should already be well known. When we look into the less familiar demand side of this ideal, however, it is essential to see that multiple intellectual forces prepared the ground for its emergence, with prominent neoliberal thinkers foremost among them, and these can be traced very far back. Drawing on ideas he had already floated some years before, W. H. Hutt’s Economists and the Public (1936) did the most to expand on and put into common scholarly usage an approach to consumer choice that elevated it to a principle of consumer ‘sovereignty’. What was novel here was that, from this one basic principle, Hutt sought to extract both descriptive and justificatory implications for general economic and sociopolitical order in modern societies in a highly ambitious fashion. Friedrich Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke started referring to consumer sovereignty approvingly from the 1930s (Olsen, 2019, pp. 46–47, 75–77), though without much further development of the basic idea. Nonetheless, its diffusion was rapid, with later core neoliberals like Milton Friedman (2002, pp. 15, 23) and James Buchanan weighing in favourably and offering their own small embellishments (Buchanan, 1954; Buchanan & Wagner, 2009, pp.98–99).

From Friedman’s Chicago and Buchanan’s Virginia the idea travelled on into other closely networked academic groups in which neoliberal and other more classically liberal and libertarian ideas were promiscuously mixed. Alongside this more strictly academic line of transmission, ideals of consumer sovereignty simultaneously took root in multiple think tanks, media forums and management and business schools. Much of this diffusion out of Chicago and Virginia took the form of an intentionally proselytising drive, which also played an important part in the rapid uptake of the demand-side principles baked into NPM by political parties of both the right and centre-left as well as by functionaries of international trade and developmental institutions (Olsen, 2019, pp. 240–248; Stedman Jones, 2018, pp. 167–175).

Placing the consumer at the centre of economic analysis was an older idea, with roots in marginalist and early Austrian economic scholarship and branches outside the more Austrian-influenced neoliberal thought considered here, such as in social choice theory. But in the course of fleshing out their objections to socialism, social democracy and ‘collectivism’ more generally, and in closing in on a more or less consensual vision of the good society, many neoliberals led the way in coming to imagine the consumer (in contradistinction to the producer and central planner) as the ultimate pivot of both economic and sociopolitical order. In other words, we see here the emergence of a new political philosophy and with it a new conception of democracy, with the figure of the sovereign consumer at its very heart, that was in time to sweep across the highest levels of domestic decision-making in many OECD societies.

In the broader epistemic background here are the deep ambivalences about democracy that pervade neoliberal thought, which originally took shape in the light of dissolving empires, decolonisation and rising ‘Third World’ (as it was usually called then) alignment, and throughout it all the spectacular rise of socialism in its own many varieties. At the same time, as Thomas Biebricher (2019, pp. 80–108) has shown, most influential neoliberals felt awkward flatly abjuring democracy. Like the more prepossessing of two siblings, the market came to be seen by successive generations of neoliberals as not only like a multiparty electoral democracy but also a good deal more desirable. This background idea informs all the neoliberal scholars mentioned above, most of them directly inspired by Ludwig von Mises, as they sought to reconcile their own mistrust of democratically induced economic and sociopolitical disorder with the need to legitimate the new order they were proposing. Philip Mirowski (2009, pp. 436–437) sums this up well: “Skepticism about the lack of control of democracy is offset by the persistent need to provide a reliable source of popular legitimacy for the neoliberal market state. Neoliberals seek to transcend the intolerable contradiction by treating politics as if it were a market and promoting an economic theory of democracy. In its most advanced manifestation, there is no separate content of the notion of citizenship other than as customer of state services.”

Given the perpetually and, since the 1980s, increasingly unequal purchasing power of real-world market ‘citizens’ within the OECD, of course, this imaginary market democracy could of itself never be anything resembling an egalitarian democracy – something which its advocates have sometimes acknowledged in passing but have preferred not to draw attention to. It is therefore worth foregrounding what in fact tends to be coyly shifted out of sight: if the market is a democracy and buying is just a sort of voting, then it is a Herrenvolk democracy in which voting power belongs very disproportionately to a small patriciate.

The reforms to public administrations accompanying the spread of NPM are a major feature of the post-1970s OECD world, though there are also many nuances about NPM that should be added here in order to avoid stepping into the same traps of over-generalisation that Streeck often walks into when discussing neoliberal reforms. The first of these concern NPM’s early origins outside of the early OECD world. Here Latin American experiences appear particularly consequential. Starting as early as the 1960s in some countries beset by strong political and economic conflict (Centeno, 2014, p. 324), but clearly consolidating by the 1990s, there emerged a whole new generation of technocratic regimes or localised technocratic experiments characterised by ‘the coexistence of a faith in markets and the efficacy of consumer taste with a pronounced distrust of democracy and the benefits of voter choice’ (Centeno & Silva, 1998, p. 37).

We should also note, second, that NPM has not been all-pervasive within the OECD. Generally speaking, adoption of NPM in the OECD, beyond the famous early cases of the Thatcher and Blair administrations in the UK and the Reagan and Clinton administrations in the United States, has been similarly high in Australia and New Zealand. Yet it has been lower among ‘continental European modernizers’ like Finland, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden, as well as Belgium and Germany when taking the latter two states’ sub-federal administrations into account. When considering such continental cases, we may indeed do best to speak of a novel mixture of NPM and persistent features of a ‘neo-Weberian state’ (Bouckaert & Pollitt, 2017, p. 118).

Despite these qualifications, digging deeper into the nature of NPM allows us to follow Streeck in pursuing the connections between consumption and neoliberalisation, albeit from an angle he never explores. Something similar can be done when looking at the new trade regimes that have been central to neoliberal reform. This comes into view when focussing on the thick cluster of simultaneously market-making and market-regulating reforms anchored principally in competition law and the regulatory regimes held together by it.

Consider the case of the EU, which provides the main historical foundation for Streeck’s reasoning about the general trajectory of post-war capitalism. Over roughly the first two decades of the EU’s formation in the early days in the Treaty of Rome negotiations and the nascent European Economic Community (EEC), competition law emerged as one of the principle mechanisms for attempts at creating a liberal internationalist order. The EEC/EU project never was achieved through the simple application of a Hayekian blueprint, as Streeck (2014, pp. 97–103) has suggested, but rather by means of a very complex fusion of the internationalist ideals of a number of early neoliberal thinkers and a partially overlapping ‘constitutionalist’ clique of neoliberals engaged in devising means to ensure the legalised sealing off of many of the basic institutional mechanisms of market order from political tampering by socialist, social democratic and other coalitions. These utopian ideals, both in general and as applied to competition law, did not enjoy unanimity even among neoliberal thinkers of the time and were moreover converted into practice through complex negotiated compromises with a broad range of political actors by specific neoliberals situated at the highest levels of policy-formation, like Hans von der Groeben in the old European Commission for Competition and Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker as special adviser to the European Commission in its formative early years (Slobodian, 2018, pp. 96–120, 206–214; Spieker, 2014, pp. 922–930).

Considerations of consumer interests were not paramount here, but a number of important changes subsequently came about that would situate the idealised consumer at the heart of the reformist process of legitimation in ways that persist up to the present. The first of these is that, under the direct influence of the Chicago ‘law and economics’ movement, which originally developed in the domestic context of US economic and legal thought and practice during the 1970s, the legitimatory infrastructure accompanying competition law (or ‘antitrust’ law, as it is often called, especially in the US context) was decisively transformed. The long-standing ideals of consumer choice/sovereignty discussed above were by then a part of the Chicago tradition, but they in fact underwent a metamorphosis there, ultimately emerging as a parallel doctrine of consumer welfare.

This was a new way of coming at older debates about monopoly and market domination that lay at the heart of competition law and policy, even if the ideal of consumer welfare itself had wider application (Nik-Khah, 2011, pp. 134–137; Van Horn, 2009, pp. 204–213). It was an explicitly normative concept third parties – economists, business experts and judges rather than consumers themselves – could appeal to when evaluating the legitimacy of economic arrangements, with no necessary regard for consumer choice and subjective well-being but always appealing to purportedly objective increments in consumer welfare owing to increased economic efficiency and generalised increases in wealth resulting from lower consumer prices (Davies, 2014, p. 90). And while Hayek was himself at Chicago when these ideas emerged, he apparently played little direct part in their formulation (Nik-Khah, 2011, p. 138), even if he and his successor at Freiburg and the Walter Eucken Institut, Erich Hoppmann, featured among the more influential middle-men in gradually helping to secure their transatlantic diffusion and bring so-called ‘ordoliberal’ conceptions of competition law into line with the new Chicago approach (Hien & Joerges, 2017, pp. 471–473).

Second, the shift to the consumer welfare standard of legitimation, which was considerably less concerned with ensuring fair competition for all actual and would-be producers than it was with the results of competition for consumers, meant in practice that such things as corporate mergers and amalgamations, traditionally seen as indicators of inherently unacceptable anti-competitive market monopolisation, suddenly became considerably harder to prevent and prosecute, even if some minimal limits to protect competition always remained (Crouch, 2011, pp. 53–62; Davies, 2014, pp. 78–94). What came to matter most for the restructuring of markets was increasingly not whether possibilities for market entry were fairly distributed among producers but rather whether, largely regardless of such possibilities, consumers as a fictionally identical mass of individuals could derive benefits at the point of purchase from given dispositions of market access and power. That in the real world those few consumers who were also the owners or chief beneficiaries of large enterprises would become the main winners in the increasingly Darwinian world of productive enterprise that emerged from this, and so would thereby be enriched to the extent of being catapulted into an entirely distinct social stratosphere, was somehow never considered fatal for the idea that the effects of the new regulatory regimes could be reckoned in statistically averaged consumer benefits falling to all individuals alike.

A third and final point is that, as with NPM, we should not attribute the epistemic change and sociopolitical effects associated with the new competition law and its constitutive ideals of demand-side order to the gradual march of reason or, following a more critical line of thought, the inevitable working out of an immanent logic of capital accumulation. What appears most consequential for the convergence in competition law was increasingly tight network-formation among EU and US competition/antitrust lawyers and academics – what David Gerber (2008, p. 1240) calls a ‘transatlantic competition law group’ – as well as European Commission officials, which increasingly saw explicit appeal by EU competition lawyers to the Chicago School law and economics tradition. The tendency among these and other experts to attribute the superior economic performance of the United States over the EU in the 90s to flimsier competition law in the former, along with various showdowns between US and EU competition authorities and fears that the new East European entrants into the EU would abuse competition law for personal gain from firms seeking legal shelter, also encouraged EU moves toward US norms (Bartl, 2015, p. 580; Cseres, 2011, pp. 411–415; Daskalova, 2015, pp. 134–135, 142–151; Gerber, 2008, pp. 1247–1255). It was all of this that helped to legitimate the ‘more economic approach’ to competition that came to be favoured by the European Commission. By the millennium, the new way of thinking about competition was already strongly entrenched in the EU. Mario Monti (quoted in Buch-Hansen & Wigger, 2010, p. 22), in his capacity as European competition commissioner, would give voice to the spirit of technocracy in 2001 when stating that competition decisions were strictly ‘a matter of law and economics, not politics’.

Conclusion

Above I have followed a few important conceptual threads in Streeck’s crisis narrative of our times, arguing that Streeck’s attempt to assign the primary causes of the depoliticisation he associates with neoliberalisation to an evenly diffused consumerist ethos first emerging in the 1970s is poorly substantiated. The depoliticisation of the demos within the OECD societies, insofar as it is meaningful to speak of this at all, shows signs of having been an enormously complex phenomenon in which economic causes exist in a messy tangle with irreducibly social and political ones. Whether some of these causes are more fundamental than others deserves to be studied further, and with some patient attention to historical contingency and differences within the OECD societies.

As thing stand, we can identify far clearer connections between consumption and neoliberalisation if we look at two fateful domains of practice in which elite epistemic communities genuinely swayed by neoliberal ideas, or employing them instrumentally, have pursued the marketisation of the polity. It has been by appeal to legitimating ideals of consumer sovereignty, in the case of the NPM reforms that have to varying degrees restructured public administrations, and to consumer welfare, in the case of the competition laws that have served to allocate private power on markets, that many of the most significant institutional forms of neoliberal order have taken shape.

Looking at these legitimatory ideals and their effects also points the way towards a line of critique that is very different to that offered by Streeck. Consumer sovereignty appears to be only an ersatz form of popular sovereignty given that in effect it legitimates moves toward a Herrenvolk democracy of the market in which the ideals of inclusive egalitarian self-rule informing modern democratic thought are unrealisable. Similarly, the technocratic consumer welfare standard, with its sociologically vacuous approach to reckoning the consumer-side benefits of slackened competition regimes, perpetuates the statistically fictionalised conflation of the welfare of the few with that of the many. Those inclined to wager that large-scale reform will do best over the long run when making the fewest possible accommodations with farce on the way might well consider this regrettable.