In this article, we present how the recognition framework of political and historic representation has enabled reactionary political forces, which increasingly recognize its inner contradictions and turn them against the basic principle of universal dignity, with the clear aim of corroding the whole recognition political edifice from the inside out. Taking the field of the symbolic construction of European identity as our main focus, we will reconstruct how the takeover of recognition politics has destabilized political and historic representation in Europe and ended up undermining European integration rather than enhancing it. Following one of the most important theorists of political and historic representation, Frank Ankersmit, we introduce the conceptual distinction between antifoundationalist vs. foundationalist representation in order to account for the series of decisive institutional changes that since the 1970s have contributed to the intersection of two separate fields into ‘memory politics’ and led to the rise of a new and inherently non-democratic foundationalism, of which recognition politics is one of the main symptoms.

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The Political Theory of Neoliberalism

Beyond Recognition: Crises of Politics and Representation

Neoliberalismus: Politische Ideologie von Reagan zu Trump

This article recounts the backlash against the neoliberal constitutionalism that locked in free trade and capital rights through the multilateral treaty organizations of the 1990s. It argues that w...

The Backlash Against Neoliberal Globalization from Above: Elite Origins of the Crisis of the New Constitutionalism:

This article shows that the incorporation of right-wing libertarians into the Alt Right coalition was the end result of a schism in the neoliberal intellectual movement in response to the egalitarian challenge of the 1960s. In a symmetry with developments on the post-Marxist Left, one group of Austrian School economists associated with F. A. Hayek took a cultural turn. Performing their own critique of “economism,” they perceived human nature as rooted primarily in culture, adaptable over time through social learning and selective evolution. The other group of Austrian economists, linked to Murray Rothbard and culminating in the racist-libertarian alliance of the Alt Right, saw difference as rooted in biology and race as an immutable hierarchy of group traits and abilities. While many observers have described the Alt Right as a backlash against the excesses of neoliberalism, this shows that an important current of the Alt Right was born within and not against the neoliberal movement.

methods

Anti-'68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right

THE SOLUTION IS THE PROBLEM: AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM’S CRISIS, 2008-2018 SEPTEMBER 2019 MICHAEL K. STEIN, B.A., WHEATON COLLEGE M.A., THE NEW SCHOOL Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Nicholas Xenos This dissertation examines the way that capitalism responded to the financial crisis of 2008 by presenting itself as the solution to problems of its own making. Guiding my criticism, is the concept of immanent critique and these chapters represent works of critical theory that endeavor to think through the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. The chapters of this dissertation examine capitalism’s response to it’s own crisis in four domains: political consumerism, the 2010 Haitian earthquake, philanthropy, and the prosperity gospel. Each of these responses seeks to overcome one or more of the fundamental problems of capitalism – inequality, poverty, environmental degradation, climate change, and the ceaseless imperative of unlimited growth – by presenting capitalism as the solution to these very problems in specific, though related ways. In Chapter I, I look at advertising that seeks to appeal to politicized subjectivities (e.g., green) and consider practices of consumption, such as “buy one give one,” that unite consumerism and charity within the act of consumption itself, in order to argue that consumer politics is constrained by the very logic of consumerism and is incapable of challenging its dominance. In Chapter II, I argue that the 2010 Haitian earthquake provided an alibi a problem not of capitalism’s making which then in turn obscured the dialectical relationship between capitalism and impoverishment and the role of debt in constraining Haiti’s past and future and allowed capitalism to present itself as the solution to both the natural disaster and the broader problems of its own making. In Chapter III, I argue that the philanthropists of today fail to recognize capitalism as an engine of inequality, immiseration, and environmental degradation, and in doing so, wrongly seek to solve the problems of capitalism with techniques and programs that replicate the very logic of capital. In Chapter IV, I argue that the Prosperity Gospel offers a solution to the problems created by capitalism by stunting systemic or structural criticism and transforming any failing of capitalism into a personal failure that can be overcome by right thinking.

The Political Theory of Neoliberalism

Citations

Beyond Recognition: Crises of Politics and Representation

Neoliberalismus: Politische Ideologie von Reagan zu Trump

The Backlash Against Neoliberal Globalization from Above: Elite Origins of the Crisis of the New Constitutionalism:

Anti-'68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right

The Solution is the Problem: An Immanent Critique of Capitalism's Crisis, 2008-2018

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