Keanu Reeves is one of my favourite actors. He has done quite a lot of interesting roles, starting with playing the stoner boyfriend of Martha Plimpton in the 1989 film Parenthood, where he says ‘Let’s record our love’ whilst brandishing a polaroid camera.
Since that role, he has belied typecasting as a stoner, despite his first lead role being Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan in the Bill and Ted trilogy. Aside from Ted, he has earned great acclamation as John Wick in the surreal ultra-noir series about a hitman at war with the underworld, and in the Matrix franchise as the hero Neo.
Neo is not usually used as a noun, either Proper or Common. Neo is usually used as a prefix, based on the Latin, denoting something new or revived, usually in a political context, and usually in a pejorative way.
For example, we have ‘neo-conservatives’, or neo-cons for short.
Since 9/11 or thereabouts, neo-cons have mostly been regarded as that faction of foreign interventionist Americans who supported the second Gulf War and other military misadventures engaged in during the presidency of Bush fils.
However, if you go back a little further, to the early 1980s, people would describe neo-conservatives as former socialists who had abandoned the socialist cause to support the free world in its struggle against communist tyranny. In 1984, for instance, I remember reading an article on the legacy of Eric Blair which argued ‘Orwell would be a neo-conservative if he were alive today’.
Similarly, we have the term ‘neo-liberal’.
Back in the late 1980s, when I did a course on US Politics – ‘America: Decay of the Liberal Dream’ taught by the late Professor Ray Nicholls if you are curious – neo-liberalism was a new American development in American liberalism.
[Let’s do a quick pause here to differentiate in the use of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. In the USA, a liberal is usually someone to the left of centre and a conservative is someone to the right of centre. In the rest of the Anglosphere, a liberal is an adherent to a particular individualist political philosophy which values individual liberty, whilst a conservative is someone who adheres to a somewhat more cryptic political philosophy which shares a lot of the same values, but which also values traditional social and cultural values. Both are considered right of centre.]
1980s neo-liberalism was some form of progressive social democratic political thinking, but which had an American accent to it (Professor Nicholls did emphasise to us that no one had successfully explained why exactly socialism had never developed in America unlike in other Western countries).
Neo-liberalism today is very different from what it was defined as back then. Neo-liberalism is what is now used to describe, usually in a very pejorative way, what in the late 1980s was usually termed ‘neo-classical liberalism’, or more simply, classical liberalism.
Classical Liberalism can probably be contained best in the works of such products of the Scottish Enlightenment as John Locke, Adam Smith, James Mill, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill.
With economists such as Von Hayek and Milton Friedman (as distinct from his son David, who termed himself an anarcho-capitalist and therefore perhaps a ‘post-neo-classical liberal’ – a term I have coined myself) classical liberalism underwent a post war intellectual revival. This is what led to the common use of the term ‘neo-classical liberal’.
Which leads me to a recently published pamphlet which I read yesterday during the 40 degree heatwave, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life).
I call it a pamphlet in the old fashioned polemical sense, as when Thomas Paine published his essays on his political views over 200 years ago. It’s only about 160 pages in length, and is there to, with a few selective quotes and some expositions of recent political, social and economic developments, blame this amorphous philosophy of neoliberalism for all the ills currently facing the world.
One of its problems is that it hardly quotes any Liberal philosophers at all, except in passing, and when it does, it gets it out of context. On quoting Adam Smith on page 4, in order to introduce his famed concept of the ‘the invisible hand’, the authors state:
‘The rich, he claimed:
…are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.’
The first four words in the quotation marks above are the words of the authors, and the following words in italics are from Adam Smith himself.
A more fuller version of this mention (From Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments ) to put it in proper context is as follows:
The proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest … [Yet] the capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires… the rest he will be obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets which are employed in the economy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice…The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labors of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements… They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.
To fill out our understanding of Smith’s Invisible Hand for proper context, let’s look at the only other time he mentioned it, in The Wealth of Nations:
[…] every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
Whilst the authors open their pamphlet with an introduction to the Invisible Hand, so as to justify naming their book The Invisible Doctrine, they immediately abandon any further discussion of Adam Smith or any of the related philosophy. John Locke is only mentioned very briefly in the opening, and the utilitarians Mill, Hume, and Mill fils are not mentioned anywhere at all.
Nor is there any genuine effort to try and define what Liberalism is, as a political philosophy which has developed over the past 340 years, or even to outline its values, beyond a few selectively chosen phrases used as cliches. Discussing the merits of promoting individual rights and liberty, as opposed to the appalling alternatives, is beyond the authors.
The remainder of the philosophical exposition of the pamphlet, if you can indeed describe it as a philosophical exposition, is dedicated to misquoting from Hayek and Friedman, whom, whilst valuable for reviving interest in Classical Liberal philosophy amongst economists and politicians, are not themselves particularly original political philosophers – unlike Locke and Smith.
More energy, of course, is devoted to exposing the funding sources and supporters of organisations and think tanks which advocate for policies based on what the authors describe as neoliberal ideas.
The authors argue that the entire purpose of Neoliberalism is to use corporations and the state to enrich an overclass of oligarchs at the expense of the rest of the world.
I am left thinking that the authors have as much understanding of modern finance and capitalism as Karl Marx did (his straw men capitalists with their monopoly of the means of production showed a profound ignorance of the limited liability corporation and its role in economic development).
This impression is exacerbated throughout the book of the phrase ‘Neoliberal International’, as if, like with the revolutionaries and subversive Marxists of the 20th Century with the infamous Communist International, there is some sort of overarching organisation of Neoliberals who plot and scheme for the accumulation of all the wealth in the world. How different is this from the conspiracy theorists who argue about the trilateral commission, the Bilderburg group, or the Illuminati?
Liberalism, particularly in its Classical form, exists, and as a political philosophy, it is beautiful. Neoliberalism, as expressed by disgruntled and discredited former Marxists looking for a straw man to hurl political rocks at, does not.
Lost For Words! 