Neoliberalism and the Loss of Glory/Ambition

Abstract: I review some basic features of the critique of neoliberalism and extend that critique to argue that neoliberalism deprives the world/democratic experience of its capacity to carry and entertain a certain and deeply-human type of “glory” and “ambition.”

The claims of neoliberal critics suggest that a general democratic dynamic is today threatened by the increasing penetration of market/economic rationalities into the civic sphere of the demos. If the category of “experience,” here taken from Koselleck but perhaps most robustly theorized by Burke, is so integral to the project of democratic politics, then it is precisely “experience” itself, these critics claim, that is now in danger of decline, with nothing less than the closure of the Lefortian open at stake. The logic of this development has been traced out by both Foucault, Habermas, David Harvey and Wendy Brown in turn, and, while it is Foucault that initially theorized the “enterprisation” of society viz. the new logics of entrepreneurial capitalism,[1] and while it is Habermas who builds his conception of the lifeworld as a conceptual buttress against these paralyzing capitalist logics, Brown brings these reflections to bear on a distinctly democratic object. If Alfred Hirschman’s history of self-interest demonstrates that interested behavior is a behavior more easily governed/more easily subsumed by calculation, then Brown, in contrast, claims that neoliberalism robs both the self and the state of sovereignty, and, in so doing, comes to see the “political,” taken here in Wolin’s terms of the “fugitive” moment of collective voicing, as interference with the norm (seen primarily as the stability of economic phenomena) and hence as the constituted enemy.[2] This manifests as the breakdown of self-interest[3] which sees its end as the “good life,”[4] or the terms to manufacture a definition of the good life as a self-interested life-experiment.[5] Neoliberalism substitutes “human capital”—where one’s focus is only on increasing/maximizing one’s “future value” (see today’s discourses surrounding the “selfie” and “self-branding”), for a competitive struggle for strategic survival on an open, unsecured and unstable market determined thoroughly by economic and entrepreneurial (not merely instrumental) rationality. The movement here is “from governance to management,” with techniques of governance increasingly feeding from, mirroring and absorbing the rationale of industry and enterprise.

While Brown explicitly calls this a process of conversion, it is one of a negative orientation, robbing individuals of the capacity to exercise a certain kind-of political rationality, depleting terms of self-interest into economic units, and thus erasing an entire constellation of political judgments. We might say that, borrowing from Ranciere, neoliberalism turns the realm of the sensible, the “normative order of reason,” into another branch of market relations. Theorists like Heidegger, Weber, Adorno and Habermas would rather point to the domination of the instrumental-rational and the penetration of instrumental rationality into every “nook and cranny” of the life world. Interestingly, the break between liberalism and neoliberalism takes on a decidedly Marxist form of dialectics: the mechanisms of Brown’s story of neoliberalist conversion reduces to a problem of competition and the incentivization of certain forms of behavior through the very existence of capitalist competitive contexts. The focus on self-interest viz. liberalism evolves into its atomized and atomizing extreme; to the extent that I pursue the good life, and all others in a competitive market with scarce resources do the same, the terms of liberalism thrust themselves to the extreme, morphing into neoliberalism as a seemingly necessary consequence of aggregate capitalist practices. What this transformation means is not the loss of this or that manifestation of democracy (republican, communitarian, deliberative, etc.), but a loss in the “bare” democratic capacity to manifest at all.[6]

With neoliberalism, then, we lose three related elements: self-interest, a pursuit of the “good life,” and the creative practices that make this pursuit individually and collectively meaningful (e.g. the exercise of democratic political judgment). I would add a fourth loss, which really amounts to a distillation of all three of these elements combined: that is, the capacity for self-improvement, or, taken more broadly, the positive aspects of ambition. Machiavelli is explicit on this point, and ties his admiration for “Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus” to precisely this capacity for ambition, explored by seizing the occazione thrust before one by fortuna. Ruminating on the will of rulers of great virtu, Machiavelli notes:

And examining their deeds and their lives, one can see that they received nothing but the opportunity from Fortune, which then gave them the material they could mold into whatever form they desired; and without that opportunity the strength of their spirit would have been extinguished, and without that strength the opportunity would have come in vain.[7]

In large measure, the opportunity precedes the ambition that seizes it; but, of course, without a natural ambition to aggressively and “impetuously” seize, an opportunity floats by as any other empty moment. It is within this symbiosis of occazione and virtu that Machiavelli frames his concluding chapter, arguing that “in order to recognize the ability of an Italian spirit, it was necessary that Italy be reduced to her present condition and that she be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more servile tan the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without a leader, without organization, beaten, despoiled, ripped apart, overrun, and prey to every sort of catastrophe.”[8] Amidst the violence and ruin, the legions of Charles and Ferdinand, the Swiss and the Papal States, the rise and fall of Caesar Borgia, history had afforded Italy with the opportunity for greatness.

Behind this notion we powerfully feel Machiavelli’s ancient influences—Livy and Polybius, no doubt, but Xenophon especially. It is interesting to compare how Machiavelli treats a figure like Theseus with Xenophon’s appreciation for Cyrus. According to Xenophon, Cyrus was “most beautiful in form and most benevolent in soul, most eager to learn, and most ambitious, with the result that he endured every labor and faced every risk for the sake of being praised.”[9] Cyrus’ natural characteristics predisposed him to “learn” and seek out contexts to maximize and sate his “ambition.” Xenophon develops this theme further in his recollection of Cyrus’ speech to his men before an early battle with the Assyrians: “and you have gathered into your souls the most noble and warlike possession of all, for you rejoice in being praised more than in all other things, and lovers of praise must of necessity take in with pleasure every labor and every risk.”[10] Here Xenophon is building the groundwork for what Machiavelli would transform into the feedback-loop of republics: that is, between stability and glory.

At this early, individual phase, however, Xenophon points to a key relationship that binds “praise” to “ambition” and the more general will to incur risk. In a Nietzschean thread, Xenophon’s focus on Cyrus discloses the importance of what it means to select the right enemy, which is really another way of saying inviting the right kind-of risk. That this virtu is the basis of their greatness contrasts heavily with the discourse of neoliberalism. Praise today has transformed, under the guise of market relations, into validation. Validation is the type-of currency circulated in neoliberal psychologies, while praise should be thought of as a category related to glory. Validation translates into a form of stunting: I “improve” myself to the extent that it improves my economic viability. The low-hanging fruit becomes the basis of economic acquisition, while real challenges are invited or disregarded given economic justifications qua investments, projected costs/payoffs, etc. Prufrock’s question—“Do I dare disturb the universe?”—is subsumed under a general rationality of exchange that immediately retorts: “well, in doing so, what would I get in return?”[11] The Nietzschean desire not to face one’s inferiors, but to be perfected—or demolished—by one’s superiors, which stands for Machiavelli and Xenophon as the ardency of glory itself, is lost in turn. For Renan, who identifies glory as the “social capital upon which one bases a national idea,” this loss splinters the very fabric of solidarity: “To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deed together, to wish to perform still more—these are the essential conditions for a being a people.”[12] Neoliberalism thus robs democracy of the resources of true, that is, “noble” ambition—of the capacity to become anything more than a mere aggregate.[13] It achieves this by grossly reorienting the very terms of “experience,” and thus supplanting the type of “expectation” that leads to the creative exercise of democratic political judgment; it re-orients the terms of self-with-self, self-with-society in such a manner that what I have tried to define as the “myth of democracy” is widened rather than closed: the “general will” recedes to show the autonomy of the subject, untethered by considerations of the non-economized “civic good.” [Jaeger’s work on Greek “paideia” might point in another fecund direction of comparison and critique.]

[1] See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 148: “it is not a matter of constructing a social fabric in which the individual would be in direct contact with nature, but of constructing a social fabric in which precisely the basic units would have the form of the enterprise, for what is private property if not an enterprise?....what is involved is the generalization of forms of ‘enterprise’ by diffusing and multiplying them as much as possible…”

[2] See Wendy Brown, The Demos Undone, p. 27

[3] And hence the breakdown of Hirschman’s, Hume’s and Smith’s hypotheses.

[4] Brown is explicit in her adoption of Aristotle on this point.

[5] Here, neoliberalism cuts across the “life experimentation” key to Mill’s intergenerational utilitarianism, as well as Nietzsche’s far different—though still related—practice of “valuation.”

[6] See Wendy Brown, The Demos Undone, p.

[7] Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. VI; p. 93

[8] Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. XXVI; p. 162

[9] Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, p. 23

[10] Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, p. 45

[11] See T. S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Purfock,” p. 12

[12] Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation?”, p. 19

[13] See Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, p. 45. Note how Cyrus develops an early iteration of the “just war” principle later developed by Hobbes, Locke and Walzer.