Power in Marketing:

A Broadly Dimensional Approach

© John Desmond

First published, October, 2025

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design, “Feeding Frenzy” © Jean Hall

Chapter Four: From Liberalism to Neoliberalism - and Beyond

Introduction

That this is not necessarily the best time to be writing about liberalism is evident as once fervent adherents proclaim its demise.¹ Growing disbelief in the progressive goals of the neoliberal project was perhaps heralded by the rise of doom-laden millenarian movements in the USA and Israel at the turn of the century. A growing sense of slippage, that the world is entering a period of flux and fragmentation became manifest in the wake of the global financial meltdown. This was felt keenly in Europe following the Brexit referendum, through the rapid growth of right-wing parties and illiberal democracies, in the shadow of the first major conflict on European soil since World War Two. But this is a global phenomenon. Who knew that the flames of autocracy would be stoked and lit so quickly. The states ruled by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, Prabowo Subianto and Donald Trump (47) are now added to the growing list of illiberal democracies in danger of becoming outright autocracies – and there will surely be more. These regimes can be seen as a rejection of liberalism itself, in the views of one commentator, of voters using, “democracy to turn against the values of tolerance, justice, fairness, openness, science and the rule of law”.² Given which, this chapter might better be regarded as providing something of a flavour of a state of affairs that to an extent might once have prevailed somewhere in the imagination of some, but is now receding in the rear-view mirror, in the wake of the angel of history.

This chapter attempts to provide the broadest possible description of the institutional context in which issues pertaining to power and consumption are contested in what today is a threatened species,³ comprising remaining liberal democratic states that continue to follow the ‘rules-based order’ that emerged from the destruction of the Second World War, such that the polity consists of polyarchy, or representative government, and as places where the rights of the individual are guaranteed, and the economy is organised along capitalist lines.⁴ Here "liberalism" carries a very specific meaning pertaining to the system of thought that sprang up in the eighteenth century⁵ to proclaim the principle of individual self-determination in economic and political life, that eventually came to advocate liberal democracy in the political realm and the market in the economic realm, as the best guarantors of individual freedom and the social good. Key to this was a shift in power, from the despotism of the absolute ruler of the medieval age to the sovereign individual. This chapter is divided into three parts; part one discusses liberalism, part two, neoliberalism and in part three I try to outline ideas as to what is happening today.

Part One: Liberalism

What exactly is or was liberalism? For John Gray (1995), liberalism consists of a number of family resemblances; it is individualist, asserting the moral primacy of the person over the social whole; it is egalitarian, inasmuch as all individuals irrespective of religion or race are accorded the same moral status and worth; it is universalist by affirming the moral unity of the human species; and finally, it is meliorist in holding that the future can be better than the past or the present. Liberalism is associated with Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Voltaire and Rousseau, each of whom lent it a different complexion. Through his creation of Leviathan Hobbes provided a rationale for free individuals to give up a portion of this to the state in their own interests as much as that of the common weal. Spinoza took this further to argue against authoritarian government and for the institution of democracy to guarantee freedom of thought, speech and association. John Locke on the other hand whose ideas were particularly influential in the USA, foregrounded individual liberty and the right to personal private property.

When liberals speak of liberty they generally mean negative liberty, that the individual should be able to do as they wish, free from constraint. There are tensions in modern democratic states between the call to maximise negative liberty, which requires a limited role for the state, and democracy, which requires a strong state for the preservation of the equality of individual rights. Questions pertaining to individual liberty loomed large for Locke and the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, for whom the individual ought to be let free to pursue their self-interest, and by extension, for the liberalism of labour and trade. On the other hand, while the French revolutionaries also proclaimed liberty as a guiding value, the more lasting legacy of the Revolution was the principle of equality which accords the individual citizen a say in the choice of who governs the state.⁶

Leviathan

Hobbes’ great work Leviathan was published in 1651 following a period of considerable unrest and just before the restoration of Charles the Second of England. A royalist, Hobbes had fled England for France in 1640 and did not return until the end of the period of Cromwellian rule. This is apt given that he imagined a state of nature amongst free individuals as a war of all against all against which fearsome prospect he surmised that the individual would prefer to cede a portion of their freedom and sovereignty to Leviathan, an absolute ruler who could guarantee order. In this ideal picture Leviathan is an organic whole such that the “body politic” envelopes the bodies of the monarch and those of his or her subjects. The linkage of the royal body to their subjects meant that apart from the Church which enjoyed a certain independence, most social institutions including the economic mercantile system, were incorporated as part of the monarch’s patronage and favour. Hobbes also mentioned the right of the individual to defend themselves from attack, an idea that was subsequently broadened by John Locke. Principles guaranteeing individual rights were subsequently enshrined in the Declaration of Independence drafted by Jefferson and in the Declaration of the Rights of Man produced by the National Assembly of France during the Revolution.⁷

Whilst Hobbes provided an ideal account, Foucault illustrated the extreme violence at the disposal of the monarch, especially that deployed against those who attack their own person. At the beginning of Discipline and Punish, he describes with seeming relish the lengthy evisceration and execution in 1757 of the regicide Damiens. For Foucault, this particular execution was important as the last of its kind in France, marking a turning-point from the monstrous but rather haphazard spectacle of absolute power characteristic of the pre-modern period, toward the more regularized form of disciplinary power that emerged in the modern period. Foucault was not novel in positing a shift toward a society based on discipline, given that Norbert Elias (1939) had made this same point many years earlier, albeit on the basis of a very different argument. Although Foucault’s (1975) account foregrounds the formidable monopoly of violence at the disposal of the medieval monarch, importantly, this was widely regarded as legitimate. Legitimacy, which in Europe was conferred by the spiritual authority of the Church was of great importance in gaining the acquiescence of the populace by sanctifying the monarch with the imprimatur of the “Divine Right” to rule.

Leviathan Reborn: The Modern Nation-State

In Europe from the closing years of the seventeenth, and into the eighteenth century, the very notion of a divine right to rule was dashed by forces that wrought fundamental changes to the topology of power. The notion of the sovereign as absolute ruler imbued with a ‘divine’ right of patronage over religion, legal affairs and the economic system was swept aside by the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789, respectively. 1776 was also year when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was first published, and although it took decades for the ideas contained therein to become common currency, the economic sphere was soon convulsed and transformed by subsequent Industrial, consumer and agrarian revolutions. In France in 1789, the political sphere resounded to cries for liberty, freedom and equality under the law, not just freedom from colonization, but for individual freedom enshrined in individual rights.⁸ While real change on the ground came slowly, especially for minorities, and more often than not as the outcome of violent struggle, these social convulsions eventually brought the modern nation-state into being as the seat of sovereign power and guardian of the rights of the individual.⁹

A Hard Road: Struggles for Equality of Representation

In one account, the world’s first modern representative democracy instituted in the United States of America came about as an indirect consequence of the 1776 revolutionary war against England. In one understanding citizens agreed to representative government only because this protected their liberty from state interference.¹⁰ Some argue that the roots of American democracy stretch back into the late the medieval period in England after Magna Carta, when the power of the absolute monarch began to be curtailed by a parliament consisting of nobles and high bourgeois administrators. Initially appointed by the monarch, the growing power of parliament led this arrangement to slowly develop into a more representative system.

In Britain, similar to that practiced in ancient Greek states citizenship was at first reserved for the wealthy male elite. Demands for reform mounted during the period of industrialization that occurred in the eighteenth century when rapidly growing cities enjoyed little or no political representation. Agitation for civil rights provoked a brutal response from government, as in Manchester, when mounted cavalry attacked a huge crowd that gathered in St. Peter’s Fields to demand equality of representation, an event commemorated today as the “Peterloo massacre”.¹¹ As the result of mounting pressure, Parliament passed The Great Reform Act of 1832 which granted suffrage to all male leaseholders, thus excluding the working-classes and women. This lit a slow-burning fuse for the excluded to wage long-lasting campaigns that came to fruition some eighty years later in 1918, when the right to vote was granted to all men and property-owning women aged over thirty. Women aged over twenty-one had to wait until 1929 before being accorded the privilege.¹² In Northern Ireland, as a consequence of a campaign of civil disobedience by the Civil Rights movement, it was only in 1969 that those who did not own property aged over twenty-one years of age gained the right to vote in local government elections.¹³

Many of those who campaigned for equality of representation such as those at Peter’s Field in Manchester were purportedly influenced by the events of the French Revolution and by works such as The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791). Born in England, Paine, who fled to France and to North America was one of the sternest critics of monarchic authority, whose direct style influenced Benjamin Franklin and George Washington amongst many others. His earlier work Common Sense took from Locke the notion that the primary duty of a government is to protect the rights of its citizens.

Twelve years after the revolution, a democratic framework for government was inscribed in the first three articles of the Constitution of the United States, specifying the separation of powers between legislative, executive, and judicial spheres. Influenced by John Locke (1690), for whom citizens have rights to life, liberty and property, Thomas Jefferson inscribed citizens’ rights to negative liberty into the Declaration of Independence.¹⁴ James Madison addressed citizens’ concerns about the protection of their liberty by drafting a Bill of Rights which included protections against government infringements on free speech, right of assembly, exercise of religion, the right to bear arms, petition for redress of grievances and the right to a fair trial.

Enthralled by events across the ocean the French revolutionaries of 1789 then called for common principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité. To the dismay of the English elite, the revolution degenerated into the Terror administered by the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre. Reports of this prompted a conservative backlash in England against democracy, with the consequence that English liberal theorists became increasingly suspicious of equality and focused exclusively on the promotion of negative liberty, economic freedom and hostility to the state.¹⁵

The Liberal Theory of Politics

Those of us who live in the few remaining liberal democracies today will be familiar with the expectation that we participate in politics by voting for our preferred candidates to represent our interests in periodic local and national elections. This form of representative democracy differs from that practiced in the ancient Greek city states where free citizens participated directly in the decisions that affected their lives. It is pertinent to ask questions as to why our system developed differently, how it can be justified, and whether it works to represent the interests of the individual citizen? These questions were taken up by the U.S. political theorist Robert Dahl, for whom polyarchy, or representative democracy offers the most effective means to organize representation in a pluralist society. Dahl developed his theory of power when evaluating the extent to which polyarchy works in practice.

Polyarchy

Polyarchy, a term from ancient Greek which describes rule by the many, was coined by Dahl and Lindblom (1953; 1992) to describe how democracy is actually organised in many countries today. In this account the needs of the people are best served by individuals voting in periodic elections to choose candidates from competing political parties to represent their interests, with the formation of a government formed by the party that gets the most votes and which in-between elections, responds to the interests of like-minded groups that lobby it on a variety of issues. Freedom of expression and access to different sources of information are pre-requisites for informed voter choice which through fair elections at local, regional or national levels, enables the individual citizen to choose those who govern them. During a government’s period in office citizens can continue to express their opinions on issues that they feel passionate about by joining a group of likeminded individuals who share their interest. It is assumed that the more intense the feelings of a group of citizens on a particular issue, the more likely they are to have an influence on policy. Interest group activity therefore provides information between elections which allows decision-makers to weight preferences during the formulation of policy.

For Dahl and Lindblom, polyarchy requires protection of freedom of expression, including the ability for the citizen to criticise the government, the status quo and the dominant ideology; that elections are fair and do not involve coercion; and the existence of alternative, and often competing sources of information and persuasion not under the control of the government. Polyarchy is also meant to curtail the power of leaders by making them compete for the role within their own party and at general elections and by giving non-leaders an opportunity to switch their support from incumbents to rivals.

In his early work Dahl had advanced several reasons why polyarchy is best suited for large-scale’ complex societies, arguing that the direct form of democracy practiced in ancient Athens was enabled by a number of factors that do not exist today. For example, the electorate that met in the agora to discuss the issues of the day was made up of elite males and excluded women and slaves. As this relatively small elite group of citizens was relatively homogeneous, not only in terms of gender but in relation to age, social standing, ethnicity and religious outlook, it followed that they were not strangers to one another. Additionally, forming part of the elite, citizens were generally well educated and wealthy, with ample time to engage in discussion of matters germane to their common interests. In contrast, modern complex societies are diverse, made up of citizens who differ with respect to their social class, religious outlook, ethnicity, gender and lifestyle. Given also the size of modern democracies Dahl argued that it would be impracticable for every citizen to discuss every issue of importance, or to communicate with all their fellows, even if they were motivated to do so.

Pluralism

Pluralism is the base on which polyarchy is constructed, as it presumes a society that is not monolithic but comprises a multiplicity of relatively autonomous groups, each of which is composed of like-minded individuals, who gather around the articulation of their common interest. The institutionalisation of polyarchy fosters pluralism by ensuring that the political life of the country is populated and enlivened by a large variety of independent groups.

Dahl recognised that pluralism and capitalism are organised differently in different countries, such as Norway and the United States involving differences in party systems and the role played by trades unions and other interest groups. While noting that pluralism is a necessary prerequisite for polyarchy, he was alive to the potential dangers this might present to democratic functioning. For example, inequalities between citizens can be created and maintained if some sectional interests have better access to organizations and resources than others. Alternatively, an association may take an overly narrow view of a citizen’s interest that ignores broader interests by producing and maintaining a “deformed civic consciousness”. Such instances may distort the public agenda by promising visible short-run benefits to a small minority of citizens who are well organised, for instance, by delivering reduced taxes for the rich, or providing incentives to property owners rather than on delivering long-run benefits to the majority of unorganized citizens.

For Dahl political equality is the central plank of democracy, enshrined in the principle, one citizen, one vote, although he recognised that the reality can fall short of this ideal and that equality of all citizens is not guaranteed under certain forms of democracy. He argued that in practice democratic governance, ‘is far from complete’ and indeed can be misused by the majority to deprive minorities of their fundamental rights (Dahl, 1989: 177). He was fully aware of the dangers of populism, or majority rule, which describes the situation in several major democracies today, recognising that these groups may include some of those who once felt excluded, but which can undermine the democratic process by denying political equality to minorities. To counter this tendency, he argued the need for a formal compromise between the rights of the majority and of minorities.

The Institutional Context

This modern nation-state did not arise spontaneously but from struggle and as the result of changes in the institutional context leading to the separation and reconfiguration of powers between legislative, executive and judicial systems of governance which are finely balanced and exist in a delicate relation to each other. This preserves Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s idea of a social contract which ties the interests of the ruler to those they purport to rule over, who entrust to them the preservation of their security. However, in place of a monolithic Leviathan, the overall structure is aimed towards a complex system of checks and balances between these different institutions by separating legislative, executive and judicial branches of the State. The three roles inscribed in the first three articles of the Constitution of the United States specify the role of the legislature to enact laws, the executive to implement them, and the judiciary, to oversee their implementation and to adjudicate disputes.

The institutional context differs from one country to the next. For instance, in the UK where there is no written constitution, the legislature is formed by the House of Commons which houses the Executive, formed by representatives of the governing party and the Opposition parties, whose job is to scrutinize and challenge legislation proposed by the Executive. This is complemented by the House of Lords, whose role as an upper chamber is to further scrutinize legislation that has passed its initial stages in the lower house, which it then passes back to the lower house for final deliberation and approval by means of a final vote.

There are major differences in different jurisdictions between the organization of different polities in relation voting systems (“First past the Post” versus “Proportional Representation”), the structure of the legislature, the role of the judiciary and even fundamentals, such as definitions of the right to freedom of speech. The precise relation between the political system and the market depends to an extent on the orientation of the Executive to the market. For over fifty years the main thrust has been away from regulation and towards laissez-faire.

Polyarchy in practice consists of periodic elections which are competitions between two or more political parties for the endorsement of the electorate. Within pluralist theory the State is held responsive to the expressed needs of the people, as to be re-elected, governments must pursue policies that command sufficient popular support. Robert Dahl argued that a crucial pre-requisite for democracy is the equality of all adult citizens who have an equal right to vote and the opportunity to exercise this right free of coercion.

Interest Groups

During a government’s period of office, it is presumed that under changing circumstances the needs of society are channelled through the representations of interest groups. These come into play once a government has been elected when different interests can vie with one another in seeking to press their claims on the formation of policy on a particular issue, to which those parties in the State legislature are expected to respond the more intense the feelings of a group of citizens on a particular issue, the more likely they are to have an influence on policy. Interest group activity therefore provides more information between elections which allows the decision-makers within the state to weigh preferences during the formulation of policy. The government then introduces its proposed legislation, which is opened to scrutiny and debate by the opposition leading to amendments and a final series of votes.

Once enacted it is the role of the judiciary to interpret and apply the laws passed by the legislature. The judiciary can also act as an important check on the power of the Executive. In the United States the Supreme Court can decide that legislation is not valid because it is unconstitutional, and in the UK, the courts have ruled against the government on particular issues of concern. In a notable decision with far-reaching consequences, the UK Supreme Court ruled as unlawful, the Johnston government’s attempt to bypass Parliamentary approval to force through its legislation on Brexit by proroguing Parliament.¹⁶ Against this a growing and worrying trend amongst disillusioned segments of the population around the world who claim membership of groups that actively dispute the legitimacy of government and of the justice system.¹⁷

In this ideal system the individual is presumed to be rational and capable of acting responsibility in their respective roles as citizen and consumer. In relation to the polity, she is expected to participate by taking an active interest by voting in elections and acting as a responsible member of civil society. While the citizen and consumer are considered sovereign, citizens vest a portion of this in those whom they elect to represent their interests. Foucault picked up on this noting the difference between homo juridicus who entrusts some of his or her rights to the care of the State and homo economicus, who says you must not, to State intervention.¹⁸ The antipathy against regulation espoused by liberals can be dated to Adam Smith’s invocation of the invisible hand, which advises the individual that if they wish to do good then they should follow their self-interest and not meddle in the affairs of others, because no-one can foresee the consequences of their actions. It follows that just as the individual cannot grasp the totality of action, neither can the sovereign State which must also recognize the limits of its understanding of the economic world which is necessarily opaque and cannot be resolved into a totality (Foucault, 2008: 282).

Acting as political agents by voting in elections, citizens provide a mandate for government to legislate; as juridical agents they are expected to uphold the laws passed by the legislature, as interpreted by an independent judiciary and to participate in jury service if invited. It is important to note that the subjects, homo politicus, homo juridicus and homo economicus and so on are constructed by theorists as ideal types against which to measure real life behaviour. In practice there are complex relations between these different constructions of the individual as an economic, juridical and political agent that should be recognised if we are to develop a meaningful account of power. For instance, the ancient principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) in British Common Law seems to be perfectly in accord with neoliberal arguments that the consumer is rational and has access to perfect information. However, this principle has been set aside by the British courts which have recognised situations where the buyer does not have the opportunity to view goods prior to sale and has had to rely purely on the seller’s description.¹⁹

Homo Politicus

As an émigré from Nazi Germany, Kurt Lewin (Lewin et al., 1945) greatly valued democracy which he argued does not come naturally, as one must learn how to listen respectfully to other viewpoints and how to engage with others through reasoned discussion with those who do not share one’s views. Lewin passionately believed that democratic principles and practices will wither and die unless they are nurtured and form part and parcel of daily life. He thus advocated the need to widely diffuse democratic principles, leadership, and forms of organization well beyond politics and into business and civil society. Lewin’s concern for the collective interest and the importance of dialogue is similar to the civic republicanism position elaborated by Philip Petit and Cass Sunstein amongst others, for whom dialogue plays an important role in evolving collective principles of governance.²⁰ In contrast, Robert Dahl’s conception of pluralism offers a very different idea of democracy, where at least in his early work, he argued for a minimal form of citizenship. This was premised on his observation that most people are so caught up in their day-to-day concerns that they see politics as a remote and alien activity to which they are largely indifferent.²¹ This formed part of his justification for polyarchy or representative government,²² going so far to suggest that rather than wondering why so few people vote, it might be better to turn the question around to ask why a minority of individuals actually bother to become actively engaged in politics?

Later in life, particularly concerned by the increasing power of rapidly growing multinational corporations Dahl (1998, 182) swung closer to Lewin’s approach and away from a minimalist conception of citizenship by advocating the adoption of participatory democracy in business. His earlier enthusiasm for polyarchy had partly been formulated on grounds of efficiency and economic rationality, that in principle participation in a polyarchic system requires less time and effort to secure optimal results, so the marginal utility of increased participation drops rapidly. However, as is discussed further below, to focus on efficiency can exacerbate the problem of growing inequality and his change of mind was brought on by growing concern, “with a loss of control over an increasingly leviathan-like political and social universe, and a loss of human scale in political and social life”.²³

Homo Juridicus

While rights and responsibilities of citizens are either specified in a constitution or enacted through legislation, specific cases are inevitably passed to the courts for interpretation and judgement. Discussion of the modern genesis of rights often stops at the arguments proposed by John Locke and enshrined in the Constitution of the United States by James Madison.²⁴ Foucault goes well beyond this by arguing that St. Augustine was the ultimate progenitor of the concept of rights by developing the argument in relation to lust, that marriage is a form of contract based on consent.²⁵ When arguing for the separation of legislative from executive power, Locke did not mention the role of the judiciary, because in his view power is related to a function, such as to make a law or to enforce it. Consequently, he did not see the interpretive role of the courts as a distinctive form of power but rather as part and parcel of legislative and executive functions.²⁶ That said, the interpretive role of the courts plays an extremely important function today in relation to the adjudication of rights.

Timothy Snyder (2015) summons attention to a fundamentally important aspect of citizenship that is easily overlooked, which is the vital importance of the law in upholding citizens’ rights. Referring to the Second World War, Snyder describes the sharp contrast between the treatment of those authorised as citizens, whose lives were saved because their rights were upheld, and the plight of those others who were stripped of their citizenship, rendered stateless and reduced to the status of non-persons whom any citizen could torture and murder with impunity. As demonstrated by the travails of the US movement for the realisation of civil rights from the 1960s to the present day, in the face of state repression of passive resistance, rights in the supposed “land of the free” have to be continuously fought over to be gained and retained. Foucault also mentions the role of homo juridicus in limiting the power of the state by protecting individual rights, which he contrasts to the very different injunction made in the name of homo economicus, which warns the executive to laisser-faire, and keep its hands off, which can be interpreted as a bid to “free” the individual from the protective power of the state.

Writing just after the Second World War, at the dawn of the new welfare state in Britain Thomas Humphrey Marshall argued that civil and political citizenship should be overlaid with social citizenship.²⁷ His grounds were egalitarian, based on the hope that the welfare state would not only narrow the gap between rich and poor but would transform the very structure of social inequality. Marshall argued that civil rights guaranteeing personal freedom were introduced in the eighteenth-century, succeeded by political rights in the nineteenth, and in the twentieth-century by social rights to economic wellbeing. His account of a smooth progression from one phase to the next has been criticised for being rather starry-eyed in describing the outcome of violent struggle as natural progress. However, it is also argued that he presented a vision of an ideal citizenship against which to measure the reality.

Marshall shared with Robert Dahl a democratic concern to preserve the equality of all citizens, and with Lewin, the need that all citizens are sufficiently educated to make informed choices. His proposed solution was for a system of interlocking political, civil and social rights that operate to preserve equality, for instance, by recognising that the political right to vote depends on the civil right that one can act freely without interference and the social right that one is sufficiently well-educated to make an informed and a considered decision. The basic argument for the welfare state is that, if all citizens are presumed equal by being accorded political rights, then it is necessary to ensure a baseline of economic wellbeing which enables all to properly engage in their political role. Equality is paramount and all citizens should have equal rights to citizenship.

Consumers and Minority Rights

That the exploitation of the vulnerable is probably as old as the existence of markets, is testified to by ancient religious injunctions against such practices such as that from Amos,.

Hear this, you who trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, ‘when will the new moon be over, that we can sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the epah small and the shekel great and deal deceitfully with false balances.²⁸

Common practices have involved everyday products such as the adulteration of food and milk, short-weighting of produce, short-changing of customers, and other forms of sleight of hand. For instance, a report from a Czech market in 1525 found that crushed pepper had been supplemented by sieved bread-crusts, butter adulterated with fat, and the blood of other fish had been added to rotting salmon to give it a fresh appearance.²⁹ Although markets have been policed from ancient times, the idea of consumer rights has a recent provenance. For instance, in the UK consumer interests were generally conceptualised in terms of protection rather than as rights, through the Trades Description Act (1968) and the Consumer Protection Act, (1987), and it was only in 2015 that the Consumer Rights Act was enacted. A similar situation where protection slowly gave way to rights seems also to feature in relation to minorities such as the disabled,³⁰ and those identifying initially as ‘gay’, or later as LGBGTQ+.³¹

Civil Society: Homo Civicus

While for some civil society is enveloped by Hobbes’ commonwealth, or the state, for others this is better thought of as a catch-all that encompasses what that is beyond the polity and the economy encompassing formal religion, the ‘voluntary sector’, charities, cooperatives, sports, arts, entertainment, and much else besides, as the rich soil from which our individual commitments and voluntary associations grow. Harriss (2004) draws on Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to argue that each forms a distinctive attitude to civil society on the one hand comprising emotionality that inflames commitment and inspires connection and loyalty to others, versus an abstract rational individuality for whom social relations are a matter of choice.³² Harris argues that both models are ideal types that are latent in all political contexts. However, given the general loss of gemeinschaft, “Whenever civil society attempted to mobilize principles of altruism, civil solidarity and individual ‘public spirit’, what was really being observed was either a cosmetic exercise, or a rearguard action by the proponents of community trying to soften the impact of unlimited competition.”³³

Once of the most powerful institutions in the land, the Christian Churches have played a prominent role in orchestrating campaigns for social justice in the USA and the UK through the years, by founding charities for social relief, organising single-issue campaigns against the activities of delinquent businesses, and establishing the Fair-Trade and Eco-church movements. As international organizations with bases in almost every region and country the churches are able to draw on extensive and well-established intelligence networks to support their campaigns. There are obvious differences within and between Churches ranging from those that enthusiastically espouse liberal market principles to highly critical views such as those expressed by Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti (2020)³⁴. Catholic social teaching advocates a life of simplicity and detachment from material possessions and concern for climate justice, the poor and for immigrants. On the other hand Adam Smith had famously argued that one should bracket one’s responsibility, by placing one’s natural sympathy to one side when exchanging goods in the marketplace, followed in true form by the Puritan character described by Max Weber, who felt duty bound to accumulate wealth as evidence of divine patronage and predestined glory. Protestant evangelicals today have adopted a varied set of positions towards the market.³⁵

Women have long formed the backbone of church campaigns and been actively engaged in reform movements for worker and consumer rights. For instance, in the United States, Jane Addams co-founder of the National Consumer League (1899) was at one time a seminarian, and her friend Florence Kelley, who campaigned vigorously against sweatshops was raised as a Quaker. Maclachlan and Trentmann (2004), describe how the campaigns conducted by the NCL were more expansive than those of their British counterparts who subscribed to a free trade ideology and focused narrowly on price to the exclusion of product safety, product quality and labour conditions, even tolerating the continuing legal sale of milk infected with tuberculosis until just before the First World War.³⁶ In contrast, the NCL were concerned more broadly with how consumer purchasing power could be deployed to improve the lot of workers by drawing up whitelists of ‘ethical consumption.³⁷ The wider concern with working conditions and sweatshop labour evident in early NCL campaigns is discussed further in chapter six in relation to the much more recent case of the campaign against child labour in Bangladesh.

Economic Liberalism

The modern free individual came to be conceived of as someone who acts rationally, in different spheres, of politics (as homo politicus), justice (as homo juridicus) and economics (as homo economicus) and in civil society (homo civicus). As described above, such conceptions did not arise spontaneously, but as a consequence of major changes that occurred in Europe from the seventeenth century onward, which ceded power from the grasp of the medieval absolute monarch and supposedly placed it in the hands of the sovereign individual. This formed part of a wholesale reconfiguration of private and state institutions in politics, justice, the media and the media. In Britain, the principal ideological force that drove this movement was liberalism, which elevated the principle of individual freedom to the supreme good.

For many neoliberals the justification for the market begins and ends with the arguments made by the eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith. Sir Keith Joseph, an incoming minister of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979 urged civil servants to read The Wealth of Nations, as a guide to policy,³⁸ and an unsubstantiated and rather unlikely claim, is that she carried a copy in her famous handbag. Whatever the truth, academic journal articles on Adam Smith increased steadily from the 1970s to the 1990s.³⁹ Given how Smith is often invoked by neoliberal economists and politicians of the New Right it is important to outline some basic differences between what they claim and what he wrote.

Adam Smith’s arguments for market liberalism must be understood against the reality of the mercantile system of his day, which involved a one-sided exploitative relationship with dependent colonies,⁴⁰ and flagrant disregard for human lives⁴¹, coupled with restricted competition between producers, and a cosy accommodation between them and policy makers.⁴² Smith railed against the common connivance between producers to increase prices, particularly during periods of shortage, and their exploitation of workers whom they denied the opportunities for joint action that they themselves availed of. One of the most recognisable quotes from Smith is his assertion that,

He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.⁴³

Smith’s approach to the market may better be understood in relation to his earlier argument in the Theory of Moral Sentiments – and indeed in its last edition, where he argued that the human capacity for sympathy enables us to judge our actions from the perspective of others. By developing an argument based on the capacity for sympathy and the role of the impartial spectator that enables us to view our conduct from a third-person perspective, Smith did away with the idea that human conduct needs to be controlled by a Leviathan or managed in a top-down manner by instilling moral rules. In a similar bottom-up process as that applied to the operation of the market, Smith had argued that just outcomes can arise seemingly spontaneously in interaction, through the approbation and dis-approbation of others, as for instance when children learn about the norm of reciprocity in gift relations which is an obligation that is readily understandable and is quickly learned by seeming to arise spontaneously.

In a statement that would no doubt be roundly endorsed by marketers today, Smith remarked that, “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer”, is so obvious that “it would be absurd to try to prove it”. This comment was directed at collusive mercantile interests where, “the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.”⁴⁴

For Smith the market is not just an economic but a social relation that offers individual emancipation from a form of political oppression, by acting as the means to curb the, “ingrained habits of subordination and deference by recasting social relations in a market context of liberty rather than of servile dependency”.⁴⁵ In the strict hierarchy of the feudal era the relation of the peasant to the local lord was one of servility, given that they were almost entirely dependent on his grace and favour for their livelihood, protection from violence and for adjudicating disputes. The growing market chipped away at this dependent relation by creating a horizontal system based on free interaction between strangers. Market exchanges based on mutual agreement also presumed an equal relation between buyer and seller. The spread of markets thus allowed individuals a form of independence or at least an end to dependency.⁴⁶

Norman argues that the linked developments of the market system and the corporation led to an upsurge in economic development, wealth and social progress unparalleled in human history. Looking back to the period between 1500 and 1800, McCloskey (2010; 2016) argues that Smith paid too much heed to capital accumulation and insufficient attention to the innovative and creative role played by the rising bourgeois class in contributing to what he calls the Great Enrichment. For McCloskey this fundamental change in the social order ushered in a period of “new liberty and dignity for commoners”.

David Graeber suggests that Smith got a little ahead of himself, given that at the time he wrote given there was no cash, transactions were usually conducted on credit and accounts were settled after a period of time. Graeber warns of potential western ethnocentrism in that it is likely that Smith’s argument was influenced by Islamic scholars, from whom his example of the division of labour arises (Graeber, 2011: 279). Before Smith, these scholars had argued that markets develop because each individual is incapable of attending to all of her various needs by furnishing herself with housing, clothing, food, utensils and so forth, but in contrast to Smith, who justified the market on the basis of the pursuit of individual self-interest, they argued the need for aid and justice in exchange relations. Whilst Smith made clear that in the marketplace the butcher and the baker should look to their own self-interest and that exercising benevolence is against the will of Providence, in contrast, the essence of the market for these Muslim writers was not competition but cooperation and mutual aid.

Homo Economicus

John Stuart Mill realised Adam Smith’s arguments in the fictional figure of homo economicus. ⁴⁷ His aim to provide a “straw man” for economic theory against which to test more realistic accounts of the human decision maker was more fully developed by neoclassical economists such as, Jevons, Edgeworth, Walras and Pareto. These economists also formulated the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility by which consumer satisfaction is presumed to decrease with each additional unit consumed. O’Boyle succinctly captures the nub of this when stating that, “characterized as homo economicus the consumer is unique, solitary, autonomous, self-centred and self-made”.⁴⁸ The student of Management 101 ought to be familiar with this ideal conception of the actor in the marketplace whose aim is to maximise his satisfaction by optimising his assortment of goods, acting rationally, using perfect information to judge alternative offerings from a wide number of sellers against pre-specified preferences, calculating their respective contribution to the satisfaction they provide and choosing the option that provides the optimum satisfaction. This model also assumes the existence of perfect competition between sellers.

Democracy and Capitalism: A Marriage made in Heaven?

A liberal theorist ought to worry when an article in a major business journal questions whether capitalism and democracy need each other. So, when a number of top economists in a premier business journal did so it was time to sit up and take notice. Political theorist Robert Dahl had argued that capitalism is the economic system most compatible with polyarchy as it has fuelled long-term market growth which is favourable democracy by cutting poverty and raising living standards.⁴⁹ In his account the market offers a more efficient means for resource allocation than does a distributive system based on central planning and secondly, because its relentless quest for growth helps build prosperity, it enables the rise of a substantial, well-informed middle-class that in turn provides political stability, by buying into democratic values and striving for consensus.⁵⁰

Early in his career Dahl had generally argued against government intervention in the market on the grounds that this affects the operation of the price mechanism which he believed allocates resources better than alternatives (Swanson, 2007). He later adopted a more critical tone to argue that capitalism and democracy are locked into a conflict where one limits the other.⁵¹ Capitalism may bring gains for firms, which are, ‘virtually managerial despotisms’, and for their owners, but these gains are shared unequally and additionally capitalism harms many others. Regulations are required, firstly, because competitive markets cannot be self-regulating and require for their effective operation an entire infrastructure of policies, laws, policies, and other action by government; and secondly, otherwise, if left alone markets will inflict ‘serious harm” on some individuals, because ‘economic actors motivated by self-interest have little incentive for taking the good of others into account’.⁵² In relation to the rapid and seemingly successful development of capitalism in China, Dahl argued that this might well work in the short term, but that in the long run the problems associated with a ruling oligarchy will come to the fore.

Several of those contributing to the Harvard Business Review article argue that the first of the propositions advanced by Dahl in favour of capitalism, which is that it provides an engine for prosperity, has recently failed to deliver in the West. In relation to this Isabel Sawhill mentions long run stagnation in real wages, the reduction of once prosperous industrial centres to rustbelts, and their impoverished citizens to blank victims of opiod abuse.

The collapse in political equality against the economic inequality produced by capitalism is another theme, in relation to which Isabelle Ferreras, In a similar vein to the later argument of Robert Dahl, argued the urgent need to institute workplace democracy, ‘or forfeit our democratic rights to those who own capital’. Reetika Khera worries about crony capitalism and corporate capture of political institutions, that capitalism does not need real democracy but rather a simulacrum today which is a charade that consolidates plutocracy.

While several of the contributors argue that capitalism can thrive within any system of political organization, Manuel Agosin qualifies this to argue that while capitalism can happily develop for some time without democracy, autocracies and oligarchies tend to reward loyalty, back-scratching and corruption, over capability and probity, while noting that corruption can also feature in democracies! However Steve Klein cautions that while in the short term as in China, capitalism does not need democracy, in the long term it does, to save it from its own excesses.

Michael Wolf (2024) shares Robert Dahl’s belief that capitalism and democracy can work in concert as democracy acts to curb the excesses of capitalism which in turn provides a check on self-serving behaviour amongst politicians. Individual freedom of choice is common to both, acting in the capitalist economy to spur competition and in the polity, through the ballot box to determine who gets to rule and for how long. However, as he sees it this fragile balance has since gone awry and he recommends actions to restore it including the need for transparency, better taxation and regulation of business and for firms to recognize their social responsibilities.

Colin Kidd (2024) adopts a more sombre tone by suggesting that the marriage between capitalism and democracy was a fortuitous blip that owed much to circumstance, brought together when a brief window opened just after the Second World War, when in the West men returning to work in mining and heavy industry from war, where they had plenty of time to ruminate, used their collective clout to demand and get a fairer and more egalitarian social order. In Kidd’s view it was not democracy but a series of circumstances that conjoined war, labour and patriarchy that once combined to bring capitalism and democracy to heel. These conditions no longer apply as patriarchy has since been emasculated as a social force and labour can no longer act as a bulwark for democracy against capitalism, as the once mighty armies that strode into the shipyards, steel-works and factories are no more and future jobs will be fewer and different.

Part Two: Neoliberalism

While like a mycelium, market logic has penetrated virtually every aspect of life today, it is complex, consisting of a number of modalities. Neoliberalism can be thought of as an era in global capitalism; as a bunch of theories that came to inform a governing rationale that all human life can be explained in terms of economic freedom and rationality; as a new form of subjectivity based on principles of homo economicus enacted and implemented in policies that have had determinate effects on real people on the ground, who complied with or resisted them and sometimes did both.⁵³ Below I first briefly address the question of subjectivity before discussing neoliberal schools of thought on the economy.

In one of his later seminars Foucault described neoliberalism as the period when a change in capitalism evoked a related change in the conception of the subject, not only in the realm of ideas but as reflected in policies devised to incentivise the individual as a self-responsible entrepreneur and steward of their human capital.⁵⁴ Casting a wider net one might consider that a model for the subject described by Foucault emerged from the unruly individualist youth counterculture that erupted across the USA and Europe in the early 1960s, much to the astonishment and chagrin of intellectuals, to challenge corporatism, the war machine and the stifling conformity and perceived hypocrisy of society (i.e. parents).⁵⁵ Nancy Fraser argues that ’under the cover of this artistic critique’ capital launched its own rebellion against the high level of taxation,⁵⁶ leading to what she refers to as a ‘counterintuitive convergence of forces’ comprising on the one hand, movements descended from the New Left seeking emancipation from, ‘racism, imperialism and sexism…consumerism, familialism and bureaucratic paternalism’ and on the other, of ‘an ascending ‘neoliberal’ party of free marketeers, intent on unshackling free market forces.’⁵⁷ While the distinction she makes between emancipators and free marketers is perhaps too hard-edged,⁵⁸ Fraser’s argument concerning the development of a “progressive neoliberalism” that steadily removed the social protection of the old order of state managed capitalism is convincing. The old order was not so much eroded as dismantled by individuals who were motivated by greed as much as by self-interest. Although Margaret Thatcher seems genuinely to have believed in the creation of a “shareholder democracy”, her policy of selling publicly owned enterprises appealed to the opportunism of those with ready cash who knew a sure-fire bet when they saw one, as did tenants of council houses who bought their properties at knock-down rates, becoming mini-capitalists in the process.

Neo-Liberal Schools of Thought

Almost three centuries after Smith wrote his famous text, his core arguments were refurbished and reinvigorated by European ordoliberals such as Friedrich von Hayek and by American neoliberals of the Chicago School such as Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase and Gary Becker. These movements arose as a reaction against the influence of John Maynard Keynes, whose advocacy of government intervention into the market had gained traction before the Second World War. While ordoliberals and neoliberals were collectively labelled as the New Right, there are important differences between these schools of thought. The American neoliberals are generally associated with the Chicago School of Economics, which holds that markets are spontaneous, arising naturally and that when market forces are left to themselves, they result in an equilibrium, optimum allocation of resources. While the ordoliberals also generally believed in curtailing the power of the State, they argued that markets are artificial constructs created by government and so government should play a role in ensuring that the marketplace remains competitive. The following discussion focuses on neoliberalism.

The Chicago School

Although originally conceived of as a model of ideal economic behaviour, the concept of homo economicus hardened from the early 1970s onwards such that it came to be assumed that consumers actually do act rationally, know their preferences and maximise their satisfaction. This ideal character is the model of perfection, being perfectly rational, equipped with a fully developed and transitive set of preferences and with perfect information to discover market offerings, and possessed of the requisite numeracy to choose that alternative from an assortment that maximises their utility.

This fiction of the perfectly rational individual was bolstered by arguments that markets are always efficient as prevailing asset prices in capital markets fully reflect all available information, and that markets naturally come into equilibrium.⁵⁹ Neoliberal economists from the Chicago School played a central role in shaping political policy in the West from the 1970s and globally, since the 1990s. In relation to the economy neoliberals argue for free trade, lack of protectionism, low taxation, low government regulation (or “red tape” as it is dismissively referred to) and low government spending. The core idea is that the market should be given free-rein and the state should be kept as small as possible, as the former is the most, and the latter the least, efficient means to allocate scarce resources. For instance, Coase (1960) focused on the State to argue that regulatory interventions can in certain circumstances lead to less efficient outcomes than will be achieved through the market.

The influence of such arguments on regulatory policy in the neoliberal era is evident in much of the literature which describes industry regulation by government as coercive and authoritarian. In the USA, the fifty years and more since Ronald Reagan came to power, has witnessed widespread deregulation across a wide range of industries. As a consequence, corporations have since been largely left to make up their own rules and to police themselves, setting their own standards and monitoring their own compliance.⁶⁰

The formal proof of general equilibrium theory demonstrated by Arrow and Debreu (1954) seemingly provided a strong basis for laissez-faire. This provided mathematical proof of a set of prices at which the quantities supplied and demanded can be simultaneously the same across all markets and was used as justification that order can arise from the seeming chaos of billions of decisions made across markets, by individuals pursuing their rational self-interest. In another of the most important papers published in economics, Robert Lucas (1972) developed the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), which undermined the rather jaundiced Keynesian view of homo economicus as, ‘myopic, impulsive, gullible and sometimes just dumb”.⁶¹

When Lucas wrote, the accepted wisdom had been that government should manipulate the economy by means of Keynesian-style interventions such as to increase inflation with the aim of cutting unemployment. Lucas’s basic argument was that such interventions are ill-advised, because most individuals will learn from government actions by forming rational expectations of what to expect and will then adjust their behaviour accordingly. From this perspective, government intervention to increase the money supply in a bid to accelerate economic growth will be counterproductive, as it will lead to a spiral, as workers increase their wage demands and businesses respond by raising prices. Lucas’s mathematically rigorous approach advocated that macroeconomic policy should be based on a fully specified model which should take into account the micro-foundations of economic behaviour by assuming that consumers will optimize their assortments on the basis of rational expectations.

Some argue that the fact that governments and central banks were highly receptive to Lucas’s critique, which quickly became orthodoxy, was not simply because of its efficacy. Although the Chicago economists rejected the view that they were motivated by political concerns, the conclusions reached by rational expectations theory, that governments should steer clear of market intervention and that intervention by central banks could never reduce unemployment but would raise inflation was music to the ears of bankers and business leaders of the Thatcher and Reagan periods.⁶²

Gary Becker, perhaps the most influential of all the Chicago economists, is best known for stretching the underlying principles of homo economicus to cover areas previously considered beyond the Pale, such as, racial discrimination, crime, addiction, the family, social care, health and education. For instance, he was the first to argue that the main benefit of education is to raise income⁶³, arguing also that the best way in which to reduce the size of a given population is to educate girls so that they will have higher wages in adulthood. Becker explained criminal behaviour as a rational decision involving a trade-off between costs and benefits. Becker’s argument is particularly noteworthy for introducing the idea that the individual is the steward of their own capital and the consumer is the producer of her own satisfaction, such that for instance, when I subscribe to Spotify, I produce my own pleasure from music. Becker rejected the definition of rationality as consisting of reasonable behaviour that is in tune with reality, to argue that it is, “maximization of a well-ordered function, such as a profit or utility function”.⁶⁴ In his view rational behaviour is logically coherent, whether or not it is reasonable, and so behaviour can be judged rational if the consumer has a consistent plan to maximise utility, or satisfaction, over time. This point is discussed further in chapter five.

From Heuristics and Biases to Behavioural Economics

A different story describes how the assumptions underpinning homo economicus were increasingly subjected to scrutiny and progressively undermined by insights gained through the empirical research programmes into the behaviour of real consumers conducted by psychologists such as Herbert Simon, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and the economist, Richard Thaler. Herbert Simon was the first psychologist to critically evaluate the extent to which the fiction of homo economicus provides an accurate description of actual human decision behaviour. Simon was responding to the influential paper published by Von Neuman and Morgenstern (1944) who developed the concept of Subjective Expected Utility (SEU), which defines the conditions of perfect utility-maximising rationality in a world of certainty, in which homo economicus is aware of the probability distributions of all relevant variables, has a well-defined utility function and when presented with a defined set of alternatives, can assign a consistent joint probability. Simon explored the differences between this idealised conception proposed by SEU theory, in which the consumer is assumed to behave in a rationally comprehensive manner by considering all outcomes, and real consumer behaviour.⁶⁵ One of his key contributions was to envisage decision-making as a form of problem-solving, where a problem comprises an initial state, goal state, operators and operator restrictions.⁶⁶ Simon found that real individuals do not engage in rational comprehensive decision-making but rather employ means-end analysis as a heuristic, or rule of thumb. Once one has formed an objective, rather than exploring every avenue and solving the entire problem in one go, humans, because of our limited cognitive system, will first split a problem down into manageable sub-problems. Simon argued that due to limited random processing capacity, human rationality is not comprehensive but bounded, and that rather than optimizing, real humans satisfice, by accepting the most satisfactory outcome.

Rational choice theorists found it relatively easy to ignore Simon’s findings, partly because he had not “fleshed out” the differences between full rationality and bounded rationality.⁶⁷ Comparison between real-life decision-making processes and homo economicus was taken up in a landmark paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974) where the authors provided evidence that individuals systematically employ heuristics which lead to consistently biased outcomes resulting in poor choices. They reported on now well-known heuristics such anchoring and adjustment, where a person’s subsequent evaluation is based on arbitrary initial information; loss aversion, the tendency to weight losses more heavily than gains; and confirmation bias, which is the tendency to mould evidence to one’s pre-existing beliefs and seemed to offer convincing evidence that in contrast to homo economicus, humans do not reason comprehensively in the manner assumed and that even experts are poor statisticians who resort to heuristics, or broad rules of thumb when making decisions.

Despite offering what to many was convincing evidence, it was relatively easy for classical economists to ignore the findings of Tversky and Kahneman. However it was a different matter when Richard Thaler who was one of their own took up the gauntlet. Thaler (1980) broke the mould to argue that fellow economists should take the findings from prospect theory into account to construct a realistically descriptive theory of economics. Such was the grip of Lucas’s mathematical deductive rational expectations approach on academics in the USA, that some worried if Thaler, who would eventually win the Nobel Prize, would ever be granted tenure.⁶⁸ However the framework developed by Tversky and Kahneman provided sufficient purchase for Thaler to gain a foothold by arguing convincingly that in certain situations consumers fail to act in the ways prescribed by neoclassical economic theory. For example, the endowment effect, that individuals demand more to give up an object they already own than they are willing to acquire a new one, derives from earlier observations on loss-aversion. Thaler’s pithy comparison of the theoretical choices made by “econs”⁶⁹ and real-life humans was clearcut and comprehensible to many.⁷⁰ These differences led Thaler and Sunstein to call for liberal paternalism which is consistent with a civic republican position, in which the state and other institutions effect policies to “nudge” consumers to make decisions that serve their long-term interests and in the interests of society.⁷¹

To describe the contest between the Chicago School and behavioural economists such as Thaler as a struggle between equals is misleading, as, despite the fairly recent proliferation of “nudge” units in government circles, the Chicago School narrative dominated discourse for almost fifty years.⁷² While professing their independence from politics, the ideas of the Chicago School have been proselytized since the 1970s by politicians associated with the New Right. Since then, the precept of individual freedom of choice has dominated political rhetoric and as we shall see, has since become deeply embedded into the fabric of everyday life.

While obviously a theoretical abstraction, homo economicus has been assumed to be real by policymakers who have elided key differences between it and the behaviour of real humans, such that it is still argued that this fiction is the only way to understand economic and organizational behaviour.⁷³ The persistence of retaining this fiction recalls the marginal status and relative powerlessness of consumer researchers and their complaints that nobody who matters in policy formation seems bothered to acquaint themselves with the extensive literature from this perspective which often paints a different picture to that of the atomistic individual who maximises the satisfaction of their preferences.⁷⁴ It is worth noting that the Austrian School of economics also offers an alternative conception of the economic subject that is more conducive to cultural theorists, by adopting an interpretive account that emphasizes social construction, subjective value and limited knowledge.⁷⁵

Ordoliberalism

The school of ordoliberalism founded by Ludwig von Mises has been influential in the Germany, the UK and the USA, particularly through the subsequent development by his student Friedrich Hayek. Mises who fled Nazi Germany in 1940 developed ordoliberalism as a response to his experience of the totalitarian state, a monstrous and inhuman formation that supposedly represented the voice of the “people” and elevated beyond individual ethics “as the highest guiding principle on earth”.⁷⁶ While accepting that, one might suggest that it would be a bit rich to compare the diabolical Nazi state to the welfare states which developed in liberal democracies under state capitalism, given the latter development aimed to protect, not destroy, the vulnerable. Hayek made no such argument and indeed supported the idea that there should be some form of safety net for the poor. He arrived in Britain in 1938 and published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, which proved influential, particularly after it was circulated in annotated form by the Reader’s Digest.

In brief, Hayek’s argument was aimed against the continuation of attempts to plan the economy which had operated well in wartime at a period of relative social solidarity when rationing was generally accepted as an equitable means to distribute scarce resources. While some had argued for the continuance of planning in peacetime, Hayek contended that by vesting too much power in the state bureaucracy, such a system would not only be cumbersome but would lead to a slippery slope towards authoritarian rule. As is often the case, many readers were struck by the force of one simple example. Consider that you want to consider the best way to feed the population of a city. While some might argue for a central planner acting as a food czar, Hayek countered with the argument that given its huge complexity, no single individual can have an adequate understanding of the food system. As he explained it, how cities operate to feed their citizens daily in the absence of central controls is down to the informational role of the price system that acts to coordinate the actions of a myriad individual suppliers and their customers.

Anarcho-Capitalism

The standout figures of anarcho-capitalism are Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Although influenced by von Mises they departed radically from his arguments particularly on race, by forging an explanation that is especially conducive to the ears of some white US Americans by adopting a radical understanding of liberty that prizes difference over all else, that sees racial difference as rooted in biology, and so is dead set against equality in all its forms, perceiving democracy and the institutions of the nation-state as barriers to the operation of the market.⁷⁷

Below I draw mainly from one text to illustrate how anarcho-capitalism is in many respects a peculiarly American phenomenon. As the founder of anarcho-capitalism, Rothbard was influenced by H.L. Mencken’s absolutist notion of negative liberty for whom, “All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its’ one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself.⁷⁸ Antipathy towards bigness is also apparent in Mencken’s assignment of blame on big business for the growth of the ‘monopoly statism’ of the 1920s, he described as a “fascistic cartelization”.⁷⁹ Rothbard’s extreme antipathy to centralised authority was evidenced in his call for the abolition of all government its substitution by market transactions such that public services from rubbish collection to personal security would be privatised on a contractual basis.

Rothbard mentions that it was in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), mainly composed of small business, that the dedicated conspiracy theorist Robert Welch learned the anti-establishment views that led to him forming the right-wing John Birch Society⁸⁰, which is noteworthy, given the unprecedented size and power of big business today. Although an antipathy towards bigness is a common theme, anarcho-capitalism spans a much wider set of concerns. In his introduction to Rothbard (2007), a fellow-traveller, argued that the Old Right was bound by a virulent hatred of ‘the whole kit and kaboodle” of Roosevelt’s New Deal, unionisation, the welfare state, and especially taxation, described as sheer robbery and “that mighty instrument of tyranny”.⁸¹ The abolition of the Gold Standard in 1933 lives long and looms large in the anarcho-capitalist imagination, partly explaining Rothbard’s fallout with Milton Friedman, with whom he once had cordial relations. Rothbard later subjected Friedman to a stinging critique, arguing that monetarist policy is, ‘almost the exact reverse of the sound — as well as truly free-market — Austrian view’… and that even worse, Friedman’s mentor Irving Fisher had advocated to get rid of the Gold Standard”⁸². The New Deal was, “a fascistic government upon the economy and society, with a Bigness far worse than Theodore Roosevelt”.⁸³ That said Rothbard shared Friedman’s view that the only aim of business should be to make a profit, mentioning a chapter by Isabel Patterson that in his view had the greatest impact on libertarians entitled, “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine,” which in his view was ‘a brilliant critique of do-gooding and its consequence’ linked to, “welfarism, parasitism and coercion”.⁸⁴

Rothbard describes how extreme right-wing Republicans attacked the military and US expansionism, arguing against conscription, NATO, and the Truman Doctrine.⁸⁵ He proudly describes Howard Buffet, better known today as the father of Warren Buffet as, ‘one of the most extreme of the extremists.⁸⁶ The rationale for this anti-war stance seems to have been based on a mixture of pragmatism and the preservation of individual liberty rather than on moral grounds. For Rothbard, “Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force” and he worried that a large military could pose a threat to individual liberty as it could be used for state repression.⁸⁷ He called for a “libertarian” basis for an ‘isolationist and peaceful foreign policy ‘ and for withdrawal from NATO and the UN.⁸⁸

There are undercurrents of racism, as in the foreword, where Woods Jr. expresses his preference to, ‘reintroduce the “good old” Articles of Confederation⁸⁹ and of anti-semiticism in Rothbard’s defence of Charles Lindbergh, who had also argued against the USA joining the war in Europe in 1941. Interestingly, in light of its more recent usage he also mentions that as a consequence of the furore over Lindbergh, the organisation America First was almost dissolved.⁹⁰

Neoliberal Policies

Mainly influenced by the Chicago School, neoliberal policies aimed to create an economy based on enterprise, and to stimulate investment and growth by cutting direct taxes, deregulating labour and reducing welfare. A related aim was to create a shareholder democracy by issuing shares from the privatisation of state assets. Additionally, state services either outsourced or were subjected to market “discipline” through the formation of quasi markets. Writ large, the application of neoliberal policies to international trade involved the globalization of “market civilization”.⁹¹ Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, industries once considered strategic, as relating to the national interest such as defence, steel, shipbuilding and agriculture, were now set “free” to compete in international markets. The wave of globalization in the 1990s was celebrated by modernization theorists for its promotion of a diverse palette of fashions, tastes and representations of community within countries, involving shedding of narrow conceptions of identity (roast beef) to embrace new inclusive identities that celebrated difference (chicken biriani).

The Neoliberal State

The new governance is the name given to the remoulded state operation following neoliberal reforms which transformed it from a hierarchical bureaucracy to a more dispersed arrangement involving quasi-markets. This change involved a shift in from direct command to steerage of policy as top-down bureaucracies were replaced by more distributed arrangements involving agents with delegated authority operating at a remove from direct government.⁹² The new arrangement was complex and assumed a number of configurations in different national contexts.

Ubiquitous, Unlimited Markets

From the above, neoliberal theorists proclaimed firstly that markets, when allowed to operate free of government interference, can provide the most efficient outcomes and secondly, for the expansion of market principles beyond the economy to areas that hitherto had been regarded as beyond the Pale. Problems that were once considered the concern of society were now laid at the door of the individual, envisaged as the steward of their own human capital; if one is poor then one can greatly enhance one’s capital by going to college; parents can effectively insure against the perils of old age by catering to the needs of their children when they are young and criminals will stop committing crimes once the marginal cost of doing so exceeds the marginal benefit. Transport, health care and education previously under public ownership were transformed into quasi-markets and passengers, patients and students quickly learned that they were now customers. Charities and even churches began to see themselves if not as businesses, then as open to using social marketing techniques.

Choice

As Milton and Rose Friedman made clear in Free to Choose (1980), choice is central to the neoliberal conception of negative freedom and forms the background rationale for policy. The desire for negative liberty as freedom from interference and constraint imposed by authority or custom is understandable given that in many countries still the mass of the populace exercise very little freedom to do as they please or indeed to express their opinions openly. The social order was not always so hospitable and was at times openly antithetical to the very idea of individual choice. Although it seems scarcely credible, within living memory a form of egalitarianism prevailed in certain quarters in Britain where one should ‘know one’s place’ and not get above oneself’ nor ‘step out of line’, inviting social censure perhaps by speaking out of turn, marrying for love, or dressing inappropriately. Individual choice previously reserved for the elite began to develop in the eighteenth century, through the relatively novel idea that when provided with two or more options, an individual could be relied on to make an internal decision between them and to form their preference.⁹³ The range of choices available to the individual today would thus appear staggering to someone from even fifty years ago. Nowadays the individual is notionally free to choose (or not), the food one eats, one’s gender orientation or sex, sexual partner(s), preferred sexual practices, friends, religion, political orientation, media, occupation, whether or not to marry, divorce, have children and if body, which course of medical treatment to follow, and for some, which investment portfolio to buy into, or in a growing number of countries, when to choose the moment of one’s death.

Quasi-Markets

The justification for the introduction of quasi-markets into public service provision was on the basis that efficiencies would arise from competition. In Britain in the early 1990s, although some expressed concern about the over-influence of microeconomic theory, public service purchasers in education, health and prisons began to outsource services and invite bids from private sector and voluntary providers, the idea being that the provider with the most competitive bid would be awarded the contract.

Meritocracy

Meritocracy describes the ideal that despite the accident of one’s birth, the individual who shows talent in a given field, whether in business, law, politics or sport, will get their just deserts by rising to the top. Many today would find it difficult to disagree with this, given that from the 1980s governments in the UK and USA have separately and often proclaimed their ostensible commitment to destroying bastions of entitlement and to dismantle obstructions to success based on privileges of race, class and gender.⁹⁴ Meritocracy is conducive to the neoliberal focus on individual difference and is linked to the notion that inequality is natural, based on the Spencerian ideal of survival of the fittest which has since percolated into every aspect of life and work envisaged as a competitive arenas where individuals vie for reward. The rarity of these apparently uniquely gifted individuals is used as justification that one must pay more for ‘talent’.

Quality Assurance

A prominent characteristic of the New Right was suspicion about the perceived wastefulness of government funding in the hands of that they perceived as vested interests in the professions of health, law and the universities. These were no longer seen as the proper guardians, administrators and guarantors of their own standards but had to be subjected to a system of continuous external monitoring and review. This was interpreted by many as a regressive step as at the time of the implementation of systems such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) the prevailing consensus in industry was against quality assurance which was seen as inflexible and as producing unintended outcomes, towards a more holistic system of total quality management (TQM).⁹⁵

Quality assurance led to the proliferation of targets to measure performance and the publication of “league-tables” that are nowadays reported almost daily on hundreds of indicators ranging from emergency admissions to hospital to the “quality of the student experience”. The current system is by no means friction-free⁹⁶ and governments seemed to have been surprised and caught off guard to learn that individuals and institutions had begun to gamify the system in various ways that have resulted in a number of scandals health and in education.⁹⁷

Outsourcing

A distinctive feature of neoliberalism has been the outsourcing of the provision of citizen entitlements from government to the private sector, which is described by Crane et al. (2008) as one of the three main ways in which corporations are involved in governing citizens. Outsourcing is a common feature of organization which has had a profound effect on the daily experiences of millions of individuals. Key aspects of politics such as agenda-setting and policy design have been outsourced to professional consultancies, third-sector agencies, law and accountancy firms and corporate sponsored think-tanks and businesses have been contracted on the government’s behalf to run institutions in a wide range of services dealing with health, immigration, disability assessment, social care, policing, prisons, security, transport and utilities that had hitherto been under the jurisdiction of the State.

Outsourcing is thoroughgoing, extending to functions in any organisation that are not regarded as core such as IT, cleaning, waste management and even customer service. In the UK, although governments in turn proclaim their neoliberal commitment to shrink the size of the state, say by reducing the number of civil servants, the reality is that this work has instead been contracted out to one of the major consultancies.⁹⁸ The same logic applies to private organizations such as airports where passengers find that different firms are contracted to complete the baggage handling for different airlines or the UK Post Office, which contracted out the provision of its core service to Fujitsu, resulting in one of the biggest scandals of our time. One of the most persistent issues relates to the offshoring of consumer support services.⁹⁹

As with their cousins in the private sector, public sector organisations have “unbundled” their operations and contracted those deemed peripheral to contractors that seem to fit fit into each other like a set of matryoshka dolls so that one must expend a great deal of time and effort to discover who is ultimately responsible. Moreover, relations between public and private sector operators are now interwoven into such a dense web such that when things go wrong, as they inevitably do it can be extremely difficult to track down any one actor on which to pin the blame, although Crane et al (2008, 57) argue that blame is now generally transferred from government onto the business that runs the service.

The Changing Face of the Corporation

Why, at a time when the corporate landscape appeared more concentrated than ever, did Gerald Davis (2016) write a book on the vanishing corporation? Davis argues that corporations are indeed a vanishing breed, almost halving in number from 1997 to 2012 and that today the corporation is a very different beast compared with the vertically integrated leviathan that provided stable employment and opportunities for millions of workers in the industrial age. Then operations were often rooted in local communities that provided a base for local scrutiny, enabling their excesses to be reined in by unionised labour and by the state. Legal changes that enabled individuals to own stock led to the increase in retirement schemes managed by mutual funds which shaped the corporation’s drive to maximise profit. Davis describes Nike as an exemplar of injunctions by institutional investors to “stick to the knitting” by focusing on “core competencies” and outsourcing everything else. Employees in the USA have been particularly affected by these changes as corporations once provided them with the security of health and retirement benefits and of a steady career ladder to follow which have since been withdrawn.

The Transnational Context

The transnational context adds a layer of complexity to the above involving physical and cultural distance. Additionally, one must often take account those agencies that were formed mainly after the Second World War when the United States was at the height of its influence. The International Labour Organization (ILO) was founded in 1919 following the end of the First World War, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were founded in 1944 after the meeting at Bretton-Woods, New-Hampshire, followed by the formation of the United Nations in 1945. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which forms the rules for international trade was signed in 1948 and in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established to ensure free movement of trade. There has also been a movement towards the formation of transnational trade blocs. The European Union formed in 1993 (originally the European Economic Community formed in 1957) had twenty-seven states at time of writing. Trading blocs formed since then include the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and Southern Common Market (Mercosur).¹⁰⁰

The “Washington Consensus” was formulated by the US economist John Williamson as a policy prescription to manage debt crises in Latin America, some of which were subsequently imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Williams argued that in 1989 there was close to “universal agreement’ in Washington on the reforms he suggested,¹⁰¹ that this involved an extension of principles that, “had long been orthodox in OECD …countries - macroeconomic discipline, outward orientation, and the market economy”.¹⁰² In line with neoliberal thinking, this involved pledges from countries in receipt of aid to respect private property rights, reduce budget deficits, broaden the tax base, direct government expenditure into areas of high economic growth. allow the market decide interest rates, privatize state enterprises and be receptive to foreign direct investment.¹⁰³

￼

While the fixed boundedness of the nation-state is contrasted with the mobile fluidity of capital which flows across borders to wherever comparative advantage beckons, the latter can be relatively fixed by international agreements between state actors. For instance, although manufacturing in the USA and UK had been in decline since the 1950s, the outsourcing of production overseas accelerated from the mid-1980s. The flight of multinational capital to low-cost producers in Mexico, Asia and Africa provoked a three-fold concern in the USA and in other post-industrial countries. Firstly, there was the problem caused by slow-burning but growing resentment amongst those who, unable to learn to code¹⁰⁴, found themselves either unemployed, or working as part of the new precarity in once prosperous cities now turned to rust-belts. This was exacerbated by fears that growing levels of immigration exerted downward pressure on wages for whatever jobs were left. Third, there was outrage at the often dire working conditions and pay of those working in industries that had been transplanted overseas to manufacture for brands such as Apple, Wal-Mart, and Levi-Strauss. Such concerns formed the background to the thorny case history of child labour in Bangladesh which is discussed more fully in chapter six.

While the seeds of protectionism were sown by the first Trump administration, this was extended by Biden spokesperson Jake Sullivan under cover of his call for a “new Washington consensus”. Sullivan mentioned four challenges presented by the legacy of neoliberalism. First he critiqued policymakers’ reliance on the assumption of market efficiency, pointing out that this had led to the export of American jobs and knowhow overseas, principally to China, which in the meantime had vigorously subsidised its domestic industry; second, he argued the need to combat growing geopolitical threats posed by global disintegration; third, he called for new thinking to tackle the accelerating climate crisis; finally he signalled the need to confront the challenge to democracy presented by growing social inequality.¹⁰⁵

In the light of the above Sullivan called for a new “Washington consensus” to build a “fairer and more durable economic order” and to reverse the trend for entire supply chains of strategic goods to move overseas. The incoming Trump regime struck a radically different stance by ripping up the much vaunted “rules-based order” that the USA had itself constructed, not only by lecturing its allies on their lack of democracy but imposing swingeing tariffs on them as well as on the rest of the world. The move away from neoliberalism to state-managed capitalism gained traction through the administration’s acquisition of a ten percent stake in Intel and the suggestion that it might also acquire stakes in “strategic industries” such as Lockheed Martin.¹⁰⁶

New Forms of Citizenship

Reflecting on Denmark’s potential loss of sovereignty following the Maastricht Treaty, Robert Dahl (1994) was sanguine, arguing that even ancient societies had to confront the dilemma of whether to have a good deal of control over a small unit, or rather to cede control to avail of the benefits of a larger one. This important trade-off is not mentioned by Benquet and Bourgeron (2022) in their otherwise excellent book on alternative finance. By focusing solely on anti-democratic elements associated with the European Union executive they failed to recognize the importance of national security in light of a renewed “Great Game” that had been unfolding before their eyes and the renewed possibility of conflict between competing blocs.

Pertinently, as seems obvious in light of recent developments, Dahl mentioned that for the nation-state such decisions are constrained, not only by external economic events but also by military concerns. Questions of national security were scarcely addressed in the debate leading up to the UK Brexit referendum, which focused almost entirely on economics, which is ironic given the extensive use of information warfare by hostile governments at the time;¹⁰⁷ in retrospect, it seems obvious that a new global “great game” was already underway even then. In the same piece Dahl mentioned that it had only recently been recognised that control over immigration was slipping away from control by the nation-state. He offered a twofold remedy for these twin concerns; firstly, that citizens should first be thoroughly informed and consulted before decisions are made to cede a portion of national sovereignty to transnational institutions; and secondly, for the extension of democratic principles to supranational organisations, leading to the emergence of a transnational polyarchy. He acknowledged that it would be ‘fanciful’ to imagine that a centralised European parliament would be as responsive as its national counterpart and worried that it could easily lead to de facto guardianship. From this he argued that need to greatly strengthen democratic institutions in the community as well as in the national context.

Benhabib describes three forms of citizenship that emerged as a consequence of the shrinking role of the state through the formation of transnational organizations, comprising, deterritorialized, cosmopolotical and civil republican citizenship.¹⁰⁸ . Deterritorialized citizenship describes new forms of identification with transnational organizations beyond the nation-state such as the European Union (I’m not Irish, I’m European!). Advocates for cosmopolitical citizenship such as Martha Nussbaum, argued for open borders on the moral ground that one should not privilege one’s immediate community over those who live in distant lands (‘I’m a citizen of the world!’). In contrast, civil republican sceptics such as Michael Sandel argued that political and economic globalization undermines citizenship, defined as membership of a bounded community, arguing that the right to define the identity and boundaries of the community is fundamental to democracy (‘I’m Irish!’). One might look backwards on these as three possible future trajectories, of which today one has emerged as the clear winner.

Citizen-Consumers and Corporate Citizens

Unlike Robert Dahl, most liberals and neoliberals effect an artificial distinction between the public realm of the citizen which foregrounds rights, duties and equality, and the private realm of business and consumption where it is presumed that the interests of society are best served through the pursuit of self-interest by firms and consumers. Adam Smith is often mentioned as the inspiration for this when arguing that given the impossibility of gaining an omniscient understanding of the whole, acts of benevolence within the market can have unforeseen and unintended consequences that will result in distortions, so it is best to allow the myriad of self-interested actions by firms and consumers to play out.

Revelations made from the 1960s onwards by Rachel Carson who demonstrated the environmental devastation caused by the industrial agricultural system, and by Ralph Nader, who described the cold calculative actions of business interests to weigh the value of human lives against the costs of product safety, prompted many to challenge the above argument, on the one hand, by promoting the idea of “responsible” business and on the other, through emerging forms of “responsible” consumption such as ethical consumerism, green consumption and voluntary simplicity. Rapid globalization during the neoliberal era lent more visibility for Western consumers to observe the plight of workers in “developing” countries such as those indentured into slave labour in the cocoa industry, of small farmers living on the margins at the mercy of the multinational coffee industry, and the working conditions of those, particularly of children, who are employed in garment manufacture¹⁰⁹.

As Gary Becker made clear, from the neoliberal perspective, there are clear limits to the responsibility of the individual, whose only goal should be to look after their own interests. If this means caring well for others such as your children when they are young, then fair enough, as you might then reasonably expect them to return the favour when you are old and in need of care (but maybe not!). Becker’s ‘responsibilized’ individual is thus the opposite of the supposedly “responsible’ individual consumer or the firm that risks detracting from its economic self-interest by ameliorating the plight suffered by others. On 13th September 1970, Milton Friedman famously had a letter published in the New York Times in response to campaigns for corporate ethics and social responsibility organised in response to the publication of Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) and Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader, 1965).¹¹⁰ In the letter he argued that the only duty of a business is to its shareholders, to make a profit, describing arguments for corporate responsibility as, ‘hypocritical window dressing’ and likening the “socially responsible” executive to a puppet of the overweening State when his proper role should be as an agent of capital. Moreover, acting as “legislator, executor and jurist” in pursuit of some social goal, “He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds—all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on.” Friedman’s likening the “responsible” manager to the detested apparatchik of the State was no accident!

Friedman did not discuss why so many real consumers fail to follow their economic self-interest. If one casts the consumer in the classic role of homo economicus then one has the difficulty to explain behaviour that does not maximise utility from a transaction. Leaving aside for the moment that few real consumers seem to act in the manner prescribed, if one’s actions are purely framed by market considerations, then one should attend solely to consideration of price and quality, and bracket as irrelevant, factors that are external to the transaction such as the working conditions of those who made the product, or the prices paid to farmers. Grassroots initiatives such as the worldwide cooperative movement that arose from within civil society can be taken as challenges to the view of the amoral subject described by neoclassical economics.

Campbell (2004) argues that when viewed from the narrow perspective of homo economicus, individuals who seek to behave ethically can be described as “bad” consumers who fail to live up to the ideal by paying an ‘ethical premium’ rather than choosing the best product at the lowest cost.¹¹¹ In this understanding the heart of homo economicus is an ethical desert that is value free, such that to make a principled choice requires the importation of values from an external source such as religion. Soper (2007) challenges this view by developing an explanation that principled behaviour can be explicable within the logic of economic self-interest and so immanent to consumption with no need to rely on the importation of values from outside. In her account ‘alternative hedonists’ are those whose pleasure and enjoyment has been blunted by the knowledge that their consumption has damaged other individuals, or the wider environment and are thus distressed by their consumption of these “problematic pleasures”. Consequently, there is no clear distinction between what these individuals value and their pursuit of what they take to be their self-interest. Soper argues that by means of such practices, consumption might be ‘acquiring a republican dimension and emerging as a site of citizenship’.¹¹² This links to arguments by civic republicans such as Michael Sandel (1996) and Philip Pettit (1997) for whom liberalism tips too much in favour of the promotion of individual rights and focuses insufficiently on their duties as citizens.

Fair-trade and “ethically” oriented companies such as Ben n’ Jerry’s have aligned themselves along with those who are concerned about corporate corruption and who sympathise with global justice movements. Johnson (2008) argues that with increasing public awareness of the harms caused by consumption, the ethical corporation “privatizes” ethical concern by providing “solace” for those who are worried about the social and ethical provenance of what they consume. In this understanding, similar to green marketing, the citizen-consumer can express social and environmental concerns that impact them as citizens whilst sustaining a commitment to a consumer ideology based on perpetual economic growth and sovereign consumer choice with few limitations. In his study of Whole Foods Market (WFM) Johnson accepts that while consumption may serve help create solidarity around questions of social justice and sustainability, this does not compensate for the lack of a strong state. He blames the neoliberal mode of social reproduction which idealizes markets and consumers as the primary guardians of the public good, thus occluding the importance of non-market measures and of democratically accountable states.

From CSR to Corporate Citizenship.

Advocates of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have argued against Friedman that large corporations have a wider set of responsibilities beyond their shareholders which need to take into account the interests and wellbeing of stakeholders and of society in general. It has been argued that CSR was first used in the United States because it was especially conducive to the prevailing ideals of negative freedom, personal responsibility and a small state, where private philanthropy had long filled a gap between need and provision that were elsewhere met by the public purse (Matten & Moon, 2008). Businesses that grow into large corporations can be stamped with and exemplify the values of their original owners and CEOs.¹¹³ This can create tensions when the business is sold on to a major corporation, as happened following Unilever’s takeover of ice-cream brand Ben & Jerrys. The founders of Ben and Jerrys ensured that the company would retain their social values once it was sold on by explicitly including a social mission for social and economic justice into their overall mission.¹¹⁴ After an escalating series of disputes between Unilever and those charged with ensuring Ben & Jerry’s social mission, Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Steever was fired for criticising Donald Trump, then in autumn 2025 “Jerry” Greenfield announced that he was leaving the company he had founded because Unilever had broken his heart.¹¹⁵ While Unilever might have thought was the end of the matter, time will tell.¹¹⁶

The reluctance of one corporation to tackle an important social issue was made clear by the reaction of the Coca-Cola Corporation to requests from Greenpeace that they replace coolant in their freezers that cause environmental damage by releasing greenhouse gases with “Greenfreeze”, a more benign technology that Greenpeace had itself developed. Coca-Cola resisted and only joined the “Greenfreeze” initiative after a high-profile publicity campaign was conducted against it in the runup to the Sydney Olympics. The corporation subsequently joined with Unilever, McDonald’s and others to install “Greenfreeze” technology, not only because it caused less environmental damage but on the grounds that it was quite possibly cheaper.¹¹⁷

As a consequence of rapidly developing globalization of trade, mounting concerns were expressed about the responsibility of firms to ensure humane conditions of labour, particularly with respect child labour used to manufacture goods imported into the West. Alongside other concerns this raised a question that one time would have been considered far-fetched if not preposterous, as to whether corporations might be considered citizens? Crane, Matten and Moon (2008) mention that for years large corporations have employed the language of corporate citizenship in communications to their publics. They differentiate a limited form of corporate citizenship, effectively consisting of re-labelling corporate philanthropic activity, from a wider form that associates it with the interests of its stakeholders. They consider, then reject, the notion of citizenship as a horizontal relation where the corporation is essentially treated as equivalent to an individual person, offering the historical example of a trade guild that might not have voted or done jury service, but could have engaged in lobbying and community decision making. They dismiss this form of citizenship because the justification for the vertical relation of government to its citizens is not to organizations but to protect those made of flesh and blood from the arbitrary exercise of power, including its own power. Alternatively they consider that the corporation might be considered as a metaphorical citizen, firstly because like de jure citizens, corporations have rights, and secondly, corporations have to obey the law and are subject to similar sanctions.¹¹⁸ They suggest that corporations might be thought of as quasi-citizens, on the basis they are made up of humans, that humans with property interests have traditionally been accorded citizenship rights, and that corporations form part of human society. In support of their argument that corporations have a civic identity they cite Robert Dahl’s contention that businesses are social enterprises, ‘that can be justified only if they serve public or social purposes’.¹¹⁹

Corporations as Governments

Companies have long been involved in governing towns, regions and even entire countries; the most infamous example the being East India Company formed by the British Crown in 1600 and the Hudson Bay company established in the seventeenth century that also acted as an agent of British colonial expansion.¹²⁰ At one time there were thousands of company towns in the USA¹²¹ run by the likes of Hershey, Pullman and Singer, and while the influence many has since waned, the dominating presence of US Steel continued exert a subtle pull on decision-makers in Gary, Indiana, where legislation to restrict pollution was enacted thirteen years after it was passed in a similar-sized town in the area.¹²²

Crane et al. (2008) provide three ways by which corporations can assume a governance role when government steps back from doing so; firstly in the case of the privatization of state enterprises and the contracting out of citizen entitlements; secondly, they can step in to act as surrogate governments in situations where the state has not taken up the role of governing; and finally, they may do so in transnational contexts that are beyond the reach of the nation-state. The authors describe how in the role of surrogate government, Shell Nigeria failed to protect the rights of the Ogoni people,¹²³ On the other hand Levi Strauss, Nike and others successfully acted to provide entitlements such as ensuring that employees of their overseas supplier were paid a living wage and by financing schooling for child labourers.¹²⁴ The subject of child labour in Bangladesh is discussed further in chapter six.

Discussion

The argument by Crane et al (2008) for the New Corporate Citizen (NCC) has been criticised for suggesting that this should be recognised as a fait accompli which only requires the imprimatur of academia (Van Oosterhout, 2005). Others contend that the very idea of corporate citizenship demonstrates that capital is now entirely dominant, occupying, ‘the central institutional role in providing basic citizenship rights to individuals in the 21st century’ (Jones & Haigh, 2007, 67). While some might argue that this goes too far, because Crane et al. (2008) define clear limits to citizenship, their further argument that business may well entertain ‘non-benign motivations’ is beyond doubt. Finally, Crane et al, (2008) reflect on the extent to which corporations have changed the very idea of citizenship. They conclude that this has a minimal effect in the situation where the corporation provides services, as the government remains as the ultimate guarantor. However, on the other hand entitlements to a public service such as telecommunications are now framed as consumer choices rather than as citizen rights.¹²⁵

In 2021, two books arrived in close succession, by Vivek Ramaswamy, and by Carl Rhodes, each of which criticised acts of corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship and corporate governance, which they bundled together under the label of “woke capitalism”. In a reflection of what Callison and Slobodian (2021) call ‘diagonalism’ and others might call “horseshoe politics”, one might once never have expected to mention these authors in the same breath as one is a darling of the US New Right and a challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in the 2024 election, who called the “climate change agenda” a “hoax”¹²⁶, whilst the other is a left-leaning academic. Rhodes and Ramaswamy come close to Milton Friedman’s (1970) position by arguing that to engage in political concerns is dangerous because it detracts from the core purpose of the business. They also separately argue that acts of ‘corporate social responsibility” are generally inauthentic and so sully and defile the very values they purport to promote. For instance, Ramaswamy targeted the use of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion index’ (DEI) used by firms such as Blackrock when making investment decisions, as a form of over-reach that is an abuse of market power. (Of course, the moment that Donald Trump assumed power Blackrock demonstrated its gritty commitment to this policy by promptly doing what Private Eye calls a “reverse ferret”.¹²⁷). In response to the demand that companies should play a role in Black Lives Matter, Ramaswamy argued that corporations should not be using their resources as a substitute for the free speech and debate that should be taking place in the market square. Indeed for Ramaswamy, a bigger threat to democracy is posed by corporations whose executives behave authentically, who really do believe in the social cause advocated by the business, as in his view this deployment of corporate power effectively sidesteps political debate that ought to occur in the public square.

Given the above, it was not propitious for the Walt Disney Company that Ron deSantis, governor of Florida had purportedly come across Ramaswamy’s book. Disney has a massive presence in Florida as the largest employer, employing thousands in four theme parks and two water parks and bringing huge revenue to state coffers. Given its wealth and power the corporation usually got its own way in the sunshine state until in 2022 it ran afoul of the local administration. The “Parental Rights in Education Act” passed by the Florida state legislature had no direct relation to Disney’s business as it provided the right for parents to decide whether or not their child aged between five and eleven years old should receive school lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity. Otherwise known as the “Don’t Say Gay” Act, this was opposed as being anti LGBTQ, by treating individuals identifying as such as second-class citizens who are not entitled to the same rights and privileges as other Americans. Activists initiated a campaign against the Act and enlisted prominent local businesses.

Disney initially remained aloof on the issue but following pressure from activists and the media eventually spoke out against the Act and paused political donations in Florida. Since 1967 Disney had been granted special governing rights over its land with the power to assume a governmental role in its parks. The state government of Florida responded to Disney’s opposition to the Act by passing legislation that removed Disney from this governmental role. The tussle ended up in the courts in 2023 with Disney arguing that its right to freedom of speech had been violated by the Florida government and with the government launching a separate countersuit.¹²⁸ While the issue over the Act was temporarily resolved in 2024, De Santis’ launch of a “war on woke” failed to gain sufficient financial or public support and he withdrew from the Presidential race on the 21st January 2024.

Beyond Neoliberalism

From the above, the neoliberal project has involved not just the privatisation of public industries and the reduction of the power of the trades unions but consisted more widely of the penetration of market logic into all aspects of life. Constraints on capital were swept aside through the deregulation of markets and the movement of capital and production overseas from the West to Asia¹²⁹. Employment in Asia rose rapidly, particularly in China, whilst unemployment soared in traditional industrial heartlands of the West. The financial sector boomed as consumer debt rose sharply, particularly in the mortgage market, as many availed of cheap money to become rentiers.¹³⁰ The crash of 2008, when it came, was the result of a number of factors. The precipitating scandal of loans to the ‘sub-prime’ sector revealed the hubris of bankers who either didn’t fully understand the complexity of their products, or who knew fine well, but kept quiet because they couldn’t get off the rollercoaster, regulators asleep at the wheel with an unfounded belief in market rationality, fraudulent activity in the financial and property markets and a massive pyramid of consumer debt.

Compared to the administration of Trump-45, which focused on reducing immigration, cutting welfare and implementing tax-cuts, Trump-47 not only doubled down on these but relied almost exclusively on Presidential Executive Orders to, amongst many other things, illegally impose trade tariffs, forcibly deport immigrants and dismiss thousands of Federal employees. By doing so it took an axe to the central institutions of the state, bypassing and overriding the legislative branch, cowing civil servants through the manic actions of the non-elected Elon Musk and DOGE, threatening state lawyers and judges and attacking the universities, by demanding a say in hiring policies, removing research funding and halting visa applications for overseas students.

From a neoliberal perspective, barring tax cuts, almost none of the above seems to make sense, and indeed the entire package might collectively be read as a wholesale rejection of neoliberalism and its most cherished ideals of open markets and international trade based on reducing what David Harvey calls the ‘friction of distance’, by enabling the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour. Trump-47 has in this light been seen as having surfed in on a populist wave of a revolt against neoliberalism and particularly, immigration. Triantidis and Cowan (2020) counter the actions of radical right apologists and governments which are implementing aggressive protectionist policies and immigration controls to argue from Hayek, that such interventions are authoritarian and coercive and act to undermine competitive markets.

Commentators were puzzled by the muted responses of corporates, markets and bond-holders to Trump’s rampaging excesses. After all, Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic mayoral primary had been roundly attacked by them for his promise to freeze rents, provide free public transport and groceries run by the state. Trump on the other hand had threatened the integrity of the Federal Reserve Bank by firing one of its governors. One economist described the failure by bondholders who go to Jackson Hole to rein in Trump as, ‘a Defconn1 event”, explaining their supine quiescence as based on fear; apparently the regime had drawn up a “loyalty-list” of 553 corporates¹³¹. Another commentator resorted to extraordinarily convoluted language to describe Trump’s actions as signalling, “a new paradigm: so-called fiscal dominance, where central bank policy bends to politics”. ¹³² I had to read that twice.

Perry Anderson casts his net widely linking right-wing campaigns against immigration and left-wing campaigns against inequality as slow-burning responses to the cataclysmic Great Financial Crash (GFC) of 2008, the ensuing credit-crunch, and the imposition of austerity.¹³³ In his view populist insurgencies and the election of illiberal governments since the financial crash are symptoms of a popular revolt against the three principal consequences of neoliberal governance comprising, oligarchy, rising inequality, and increasing factor mobility. Taking oligarchy first, two studies revealed a huge loss of confidence in the political system in America and in Europe, with just 28% of voters in the former believing that democracy working,¹³⁴ lower even than after the Capitol riots in 2021, coupled to the belief that the state has been captured by vested interests.¹³⁵ Crane et al, (2008) observed this trend some years ago and argued that social disquiet is not so much about the fact that corporations exert power on government to serve their interests and to shape citizenship, but rather on the lack of transparency and corporate accountability.¹³⁶ Populist revolts that followed the GFC were directed against national and supranational elites such as the EU¹³⁷, with political allegiances oscillating from left to right as the centre, as Yeats once wrote, failed to hold. The populist revolt that followed the crash was directed against national and supranational elites such as the EU, reducing the centre ground while boosting extreme parties to left and right.¹³⁸Anderson argues that the right has so far won because the traditional working class is no more and the left has not developed a convincing alternative narrative to neoliberalism.

Anderson does not discuss how distrust in democratic institutions and central government fed into the narrative that the state is controlled by a shadowy elite, manifested in the belief in a ‘deep state’ that controls what is really going on. Prior to the 2016 US election, following the leak of Hilary Clinton’s emails by foreign agents, the QAnon conspiracy theory that spread rapidly from media sites Fourchan and Eightchan alleged that the Clintons headed a gang of vampire paedophile rapists who murdered children in a New York pizza restaurant.¹³⁹ Fears were further stoked during the Covid pandemic the US Department of Health was accused of embedding computer chips in vaccines.

Reflecting on seemingly outlandish conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Gatehouse (2025), has found real-life parallels. Whether or not they openly express such fears, individuals today feel powerless and overwhelmed in the face of the impending climate crisis, of their smallness relative to the massive size of corporations, of the precarity of employment amid well-publicised warnings of being overwhelmed by hordes of migrants, of being defrauded by social media scams, and of the rapidly rising threat posed by the Artificial Intelligence, heralded as the biggest change to society since the fifteenth century. There are real analogues of imaginary fears, in the form of predatory paedophiles and sex-abusers such as Jimmy Saville and Jeffry Epstein who collogued with the elite while abusing children and young women with impunity in plain sight, the secret world revealed by Wikileaks and the Panama Papers, and evidence of politicians who use access to privileged information that can directly influence business interests and power to regulate (or not) the scope of business activities and control over taxes, subsidies, fines and mandates as leverage, whose salaries which are around 3.4 times that of the average worker, is belied by their actual wealth.¹⁴⁰

Culture Wars

For Francis Fukuyama, neoliberalism is one of two developments that have seriously undermined liberal values of respect for the equal dignity of individuals through the rule of law that protects their rights and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights. He blames western governments for sitting on the sidelines while capital and jobs flowed to enrich workers in Asia, thus highlighting a failure of governments which should have protected their citizens who lost jobs, opportunities and hope, or at least have acted to ameliorate their situation. Fukuyama also blames the rise of “woke” liberalism in the form of the prioritisation of identity politics by the left from the 1990s, which privileged the rights of minorities and immigrants over the fate of the industrial working class.¹⁴¹

Fukuyama has a point in that the ‘culture wars’ which have been raging on and off university campuses for the past ten and more years have fed into the current state of affairs. On the one hand commentators have noted a change in the behaviour of minorities and those who represent them who had at one time campaigned vigorously for equality, so as to be included as full members of society and recognised as the possessing the same rights as everyone else. This has been supplanted by calls for recognition, not on the basis of one’s equal standing with others, but of one’s difference, being different for example from those now disparaged as ‘gender-typical’ or ‘neuro-typical’. Relatedly, some adherents of Critical Race Theory began to preach a variant of feminist standpoint epistemology, that only those from oppressed minorities who experience a particular form of suffering, for instance, the individual who identifies as Irish, working-class and Trans, has a right to speak, or write about their experience.

In the institutional context advocacy groups signed up thousands of public institutions and businesses to gender diversity programmes. In the UK these groups pressed for the enactment of legislation to enable individuals to nominate their gender and to re-define the meaning of key terms such as “woman” and “mother” by widening their scope.¹⁴² Proclaiming itself as the largest in Europe, the UK based lobby group Stonewall enjoyed social marketing success by promoting and selling its perspective on sex and identity to more than eight hundred organisations in government, political parties, business and most universities which it also polices.¹⁴³ The Global Workplace Equality Index (GWEI) devised by Stonewall allocates scores to institutions based on their progress towards implementing their version of gender known as the ‘Gender Bred Person’. Concerns have since been raised as to how Stonewall gained this pre-eminent position, given it is just one from a number of groups that lobby government on questions of sex and gender. Following a BBC led¹⁴⁴ investigation many institutions have since left one or both of its initiatives.¹⁴⁵ Stonewall has also been mentioned as having a ‘chilling’ effect on free speech by playing a ‘direct role’ in a report on the ‘cancelling’ of a visiting academic from Essex University¹⁴⁶ and later in the removal from Sussex University of the ‘gender-critical’ theorist Professor Kathleen Stock who had criticised its definition of transphobia as being too wide.¹⁴⁷

The situation of the UK universities is illustrative of what Callison and Slobodian call diagonalism, so named because traditional dividing lines based on politics and gender have given way to more complex relations. For instance, longtime campaigner for gay rights Peter Tatchell was criticised by Trans activists for signing a letter on defence of free speech which cited attempts to ban feminists Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel and gender-critical feminists who had raised concerns about predatory men gaining access to womens’ spaces.¹⁴⁸ The term “woke”, which once narrowly referred to black consciousness has since been appropriated by those on the right and given a pejorative gloss as a signifier that articulates concern for racial equality, diversity, sexual and gender rights and paradoxically, global heating, such that engagement with any of these issues is re-signified been as ‘woke politics’, to signify effete, ‘radical chic’, elitism promulgated by the ‘rainbow left’, comprising college-educated scroungers who couldn’t care less about blue-collar concerns.¹⁴⁹ It has not difficult for hard-right activists to mobilize the resentment of those ‘left behind’ in this direction, who feel slighted against what they perceive to be elite concern with identity politics, to themselves identify as ‘anti-woke’, howsoever so defined.¹⁵⁰

Horse-Shoe Politics?

From the above the New Right movement might be regarded as the mirror-image of its equally hard-edged counterpart organised on college campuses by those who refuse to tolerate ideas, opinions or people they deem intolerable, cancelling events and de-platforming and scapegoating individuals whose views they consider repugnant. As mentioned above the ‘culture wars’ that have bubbled up in the last decade or so are not so much between left and right but diagonalist in the sense that old identifications no longer matter.¹⁵¹ Given that they are deemed middle-class by origin, or education, right-wing activists share in common with their leftist predecessors the tendency to claim that they are the true, authentic voice of those they represent. In the 1990s, British leftist anti-road-protestors despised those they labelled “fluffies’ just as neo-Nazi’s in Italy, Germany and Poland today proclaim their difference from the “rainbow left”. In Living Right, Agnieska Pasieka (2024) describes as vicarious ressentiment the outrage that these middle-class activists, “experience in the name of others’¹⁵²

What is striking is the extent to which New Right activists in Europe have with some exceptions, embraced US neo-libertarian rhetoric which echoes Russian propaganda¹⁵³, raising the spectre of national socialism by sharing the old left’s antipathy to capitalism, particularly against big corporations, and by engaging in social welfare programmes among the (white) “deserving poor”, fomenting violence by organising anti-immigration demonstrations and casting themselves as the sole proponents of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal radicalism, since in their view the left “made peace” with the free market¹⁵⁴. Against calls for diversity they assert “traditional masculine” values that critics portray as “toxic masculinity”, espousing ethno-nationalist rhetoric; circulating potent myths such as the “great replacement theory” and advocating apartheid based on supposed racial difference; and avowing a perverted view of Christianity that reduces it to a caricature of ritual stripped of its religiosity.¹⁵⁵

What does all of this have to do with capitalism? Quite a lot, it seems. Anderson (2025) argues that while the left focused on inequality, the right leveraged factor mobility by focusing on immigration. For him the Brexit vote was a landmark populist revolt against the bipartisan neoliberal establishment whipped up by right-wing politicians and the tabloid press. While some pointed to role played by egregious lies, the use of misleading slogans and the involvement of malign actors in the Leave campaign, for many, the Brexit vote was an expression of ressentiment felt by voters who felt that they had been cast adrift and left to founder, particularly those living in regions such as the “Red Wall’, in the wake of the flight of capital overseas. The slogan ‘Take Back Control’ deployed by the Leave campaign had significant cut-through with voters, particularly in the context of a so-called migration crisis, highlighting the lack of ability for the nation-state to maintain control of its borders.¹⁵⁶

Neo-Libertarianism

In relation to the Brexit vote others have pointed to murkier forces at work behind the scenes such as the malign actors involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Some asked why, if Britain was going to become great again did Somerset Capital, part owned by prominent Brexit spokesperson Jacob Rees-Mogg choose that specific time to relocate its base from the UK to Ireland? Alongside meddling by foreign states, most analyses of the Brexit vote to leave the EU explained the result as a protest against government expressing the bottled-up resentment of large sections of the population following years of austerity imposed in the wake of the financial crash and at the impunity of bankers, coupled with the widespread feeling that government had ceded control over important aspects of policy, especially on immigration and the administration of justice, to unelected technocrats from the European Union.

The elegant analysis conducted by Benquet and Bourgeron, (2022) complexifies this story by focusing on the ‘supply side’, upending the assumption that capital, in particular finance capital, supported the pro-Remain camp. They demonstrate that although traditional institutions such as banks and insurance companies backed the campaign to Remain, second-wave finance, made up largely of hedge funds, private equity and real estate funds, heavily backed the Leave campaign.¹⁵⁷ Their rationale for doing so was straightforward; the less the regulatory burden, the more scope for profit. Benquet and Bourgeron sum up the overall orientation of second-wave finance as, ‘Euroscepticism, Atlanticism, authoritarianism and denial of climate change’,¹⁵⁸ which generally accords with right-wing sentiment, although why single out climate change? The authors illustrate the linkage of second-wave finance to the ‘Tufton Street’ network, so-called because this is the London base for influential think-tanks such as the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), Economists for Free Trade and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). These are linked to the Atlas Foundation, a collective of over four hundred libertarian think-tanks linked to the ‘alt-right’ in the USA.¹⁵⁹

Benquet and Bourgeron mention that one of the central members of this network is the Cato Institute funded by the Koch brothers who made their billions from fossil fuels and are committed deniers of global warming. Overall, those they describe as authoritarian libertarians take isolationist, but not protectionist, views, and reject state regulation and any form of interstate relationship. Contra Adam Smith and Hayek, for both had a vision of the common good, authoritarian libertarianism, defends ‘an ethical approach to liberty without any regard for its effects on the common good.’ Although it is libertarian in economic terms it is socially authoritarian as it favours the repression of social movements and the suppression of civil rights, by controlling freedom of speech and the movement of individuals.¹⁶⁰

Reading Benquet and Bourgeron can help make sense of a document entitled the ‘NatCon manifesto’ that I came across by chance.¹⁶¹ When I first read it the manifesto seemed to proclaim the end of the conservative right’s commitment to neoliberalism. The ten principles are,¹⁶²

To maintain national sovereignty and independence.

To reject globalism and transnational institutions.

focus on the integrity of, ‘a strong’ nation state, but shorn of the function of civil administration “a policy making judiciary”.

‘The Bible should be read as the first among sources of a shared Western civilization’.

A commitment to law and order.

The free market cannot be absolute because hostile powers have manipulated markets to ‘despoil America and other countries and because multinational companies damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits’.

Focus research expenditure on military applications.

Work to preserve ‘family values’ and against ‘unconstrained individualism’.

Recognize that, ‘unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability.

Against racism in all its forms.

While many if not most of the above might be rather puzzling to those of a neoliberal sensibility (for instance, why the focus on religion and against ‘unconstrained individualism’?), points two and nine are directly antithetical to neoliberal principles, point six is particularly so, as well as being distinctly odd in its quaint expression (“despoiled’), use of hyperbole (‘floods of addictive substances and pornography’) and opaque untethered accusations (multinationals censoring speech). Something of this logic has since been clarified as it virtually mirrors the language used by Donald Trump when he announced a swingeing set of tariffs on so-called “Liberation Day”, the second of April, 2025.

Hayek was faced with the conundrum to explain the evolution of the modern form of ‘power with’ exercised in the marketplace constituted unintentionally by transactions between strangers who are indifferent to each other, from the solidary communal form of ‘power-with’ engaged in by kinship groups in the African savanna over the long course of the Pleistocene. He envisaged a continual tension between the ancient impulse that draws us inwards towards community and the countervailing drive towards individuality in a market society. Slobodian notes the difficulty of trying to imagine how the former might give rise to the latter,

Hayek seemed to demand something elusive: a small group without the group feeling that might move in the direction of sharing, a society absent of demands for social justice, a troop with no impulse toward redistribution; a small group with communal cohesion without a sense of community. ¹⁶³

Hayek did not base his explanation on genes but rather on cultural evolution, suggesting that the old solidary order broke down as societies grew larger and more differentiated. As communality broke down, so cultural group selection over aeons led to the emergence of a new morality that laid down rules for how to dwell amicably amongst strangers, involving virtues honesty, respect for property, privacy, contract, exchange, trade, competition and gain. Moreover, although both moralities continue to exist alongside one another today, given that the more ancient draw towards egalitarianism is more potent, it must be restrained, as egalitarianism works against the prosperity yielded by market competition. It is noteworthy that groups matter in Hayek’s explanation only to the extent that they serve as the media for cultural transmission by religion and other institutions of these new ‘symbolic truths’.¹⁶⁴

Given that Hayek’s explanation is an early example of theorisation from the perspective of cultural group, or multilevel, selection, it is worth noting that proponents today have reached the markedly different conclusion that the most successful groups are those that suppress within-group competition and are not dominated by elites.¹⁶⁵ But why let facts get in the way of one’s preferred argument! Slobodian describes how Hayek’s followers, whether anarcho-capitalists or paleolibertarians, moved boldly onward to formulate explanations that are much more hard-edged than Hayek’s, based on largely outmoded arguments linked to racial and gender differences that many academics assumed had long ago been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Slobodian’s (2025) main contribution is to describe how anarcho-capitalists such as Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and other members of the US alt-right¹⁶⁶ effectively moulded Hayek and particularly, Mises,¹⁶⁷ to a homegrown image of white supremacy wedded to methodological instrumentalism that seems beloved to so many in that benighted country, summed up in the three, ‘Hs’; hard-culture, hard borders, and hard currency. In search of academic credibility, they embraced the findings of psychologists Richard Lynn and Hans Eysenck, who contended that they had demonstrated the existence of immutable differences between groups based on race and gender. Anarcho-capitalists were particularly taken by the claim by Herrrnstein and Murray (1994) that inherited IQ and not environmental factors determines employment, income, welfare dependency, divorce and parental behaviour. In their book the authors gave particular credence to the research findings of Richard Lynn, based on his collection of national data sets of IQ. Leon Kamin was scathing in his review of Lynn’s research, arguing that, “Lynn’s distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity” (Kamin, 1995, 100). Kamin also argued that The Bell Curve was based on similar shoddy research that involved treating correlation as causation as, ‘another eruption of crude biological determinism’ whose argument was ‘at many critical points pathetic’.¹⁶⁸

Despite mounting criticism that their argument for ‘hard culture’ rests on sand, apologists for this view continue to dress overt racism in the clothes of scientific objectivity, essentialising supposed cultural difference, by arguing for a racial hierarchy that ensures whites come out on top one way (based on differences in climate)¹⁶⁹ or another (on the basis of differences in IQ). On the basis of at best shaky evidence, they continue to argue that egalitarianism is morally reprehensible and affirmative action and overseas aid programmes are wasteful because of “hard” cultural differences in abilities and attitudes, and so condemn the ‘forced integration’ of schools.¹⁷⁰

While some might think that hard borders are antithetical to neoliberalism, which aspires to free movement of people as well as free markets, Mises and Hayek offered some grounds for controlling immigration,¹⁷¹ whilst English radical Peter Brimelow attempted to justify the free movement of goods but not of people by arguing that, if free trade works effectively, there should be no need for immigration.¹⁷² Brimelow appealed to those with leftist sympathies by arguing that immigration is a means for the white elite to ‘prey on their fellow Americans’ to make them even richer through paying lower wages.¹⁷³ This argument is also spurious as there is ample evidence from the USA and elsewhere that immigration actually enriches local populations.¹⁷⁴ Brimelow espoused the formation of “ethno-states” based on race as a response to his claim that immigration “deconstructs” the homogeneity of the population. Fukuyama on the other hand mentioned the more palatable form of ”designer immigration”, where immigrants are selected for their economic utility, using race and culture as proxies.¹⁷⁵

Promoting Libertarianism

While Slobodian (2025) focuses generally on the genealogy of ideas that link market libertarians to social conservatives and the hard right, he also discusses questions relevant to marketing by offering his view of how these ideas developed and spread out from the fringes and into mainstream of political thought in the USA, Europe and South America. His argument is that in addition to individual commitment, the successful marketing of ideas requires organization, funding, a compelling message and a receptive audience.

Taking organization, in providing an account of the ‘often tangled genealogies’ that tie market extremism to social conservative and far-right forces. Nonetheless, some events are more significant than are others. In relation to organization, For instance, Slobodian describes as an important moment the alliance formed in November 1989 between neoliberals and conservatives on the shared assumption that religion, custom and tradition can provide a grounding for society that might otherwise be destroyed by too much freedom. He also notes that from Hayek’s ‘savanna story’, libertarians decided that a purely market-based society is unnatural and cannot exist on its own but requires some form of grounding in tradition, solidarity and identification, the question being how much and to what extent?

Slobodian is well aware that transnational links are undergirded by a dense network of social contacts lubricated by big money.¹⁷⁶ While a thorough analysis of this issue deserves a book-length treatment in its own right, one set of nodes is formed by a global network of thirty or so Mises Institutes which is supplemented by an interlacing set of “think tanks’ and pressure-groups linked to mainstream politics whose members produce blogs and content for Instagram and TikTok, which are in turn linked to the radical right. Extensive ties exist between those on the right in Europe and in the USA. Amongst others, the UK Conservative and Reform parties have links to the US based Heritage Foundation which is heavily funded by fossil fuel interests, including in its “Project 2025” document a proposal to reverse action to tackle global heating and laws based on environmental protection.¹⁷⁷

If one is to follow the money, then it seems that with respect to funding, many, if not most roads lead to the Koch brothers who have provided massive funding to counter action against global heating. The British “power” couple Matthew and Sarah Elliott have links to Koch. Matthew Elliott, the chairman of the Vote Leave campaign was at one time associated the ‘second-wave’ financier Howard Shore and founded Big Brother Watch, which campaigns against state surveillance; Business for Britain, the New Culture Forum, and intriguingly, Conservative Friends of Russia.¹⁷⁸ His wife Sarah, the other half of the ‘power-couple’ was reported to have extensive links to the right in the US.¹⁷⁹ Other links connect James Orr, until recently, a little-known British academic and founder of National Conservatism, to US Vice President J.D. Vance, and to Peter Thiel.¹⁸⁰ The mention of Thiel reminds that the deepest pockets of all are those of the techno-libertarians such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, in whose company billionaire Peter Thiel is small fry.

Slobodian notes a difference between Hayek and Rothbard regarding the target audience for their message. Hayek argued the need to educate the elite against the danger of the centrifugal tendency for society to regress towards socialism, whereas Rothbard argued for the opposite approach, to appeal to the masses.¹⁸¹ The success of Rothbard’s prescription has been evident in the extensive use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram in the period prior to the Brexit vote and in the campaigns for Trump.¹⁸². Simply worded statements such as “Take Back Control” and “Make X Great Again) have found a receptive place in the minds of those who are aghast at the prospect of cuts to benefits that were yesterday regarded as luxuries that are now regarded as necessities and entitlements, who harbour deep ressentiment, coupled with a sense of exceptionalism and decline relative to the income and status of others. From a theoretical perspective it is worth revisiting Hayek’s “savanna” story, as his argument for the need to sustain the artificial centrifugal force of the “free” market as an antidote to the centripetal pull towards a fictional vision of a ‘primal’ community, is distinctly at odds with such sentiments.

As I see it Slobodian sums up the core libertarian message as modelled on a classic “fear appeal” based on a “deficit-solution” approach where the marketer names the deficit (“You suffer from halitosis?”),¹⁸³ then offers the magic solution (“Take Listerine!”). The three “H’s” named by Slobodian, (‘hard’ borders, ‘hard’ cultural differences, a ‘hard’ currency) admirably sum up the message, “We will establish hard borders to protect you against the hordes of immigrants who are stealing your jobs and replacing your culture”; “We will put a stop to multiculturalism and affirmative action and instead create a society segregated by education and race”¹⁸⁴; “We will stop your payday cheque from being further eroded by “quantitative easing’ and inflation caused by central bank meddling that benefits the rich”.

Concluding Reflection

This chapter has strayed from a basic introduction to liberalism, including concepts of homo economicus, homo juridicus and homo civicus, to discussion of the neoliberal order, and finally to the rise to prominence of neo-libertarianism and the onset of “culture wars” between this and what it deems to be ‘woke’ politics. In this concluding reflection I want to consider the idea that this shift has been fuelled by the politics of ressentiment, whether experienced personally, or vicariously and has been amplified by the silos of social media space created in the first instance by the flight of Querdenken coronaskeptics from Youtube and Facebook that flagged and censored their posts to alternative platforms, such as BitChute, DLive, Gab, MeWe, Odyssey, Parler, Periscope, Patreon, Rumble, Substack, Telegram, Twitch, and VK. This is the grey zone where conspiracy theories thrive, where the preservation of identity matters more than that of truth. Ressentiment at austerity, unequal treatment, loss of privilege and entitlement, fear, and the projection of sadistic impulses towards ‘others’ especially migrants who are reported daily to be flooding the country, the disciplinary power of markets, global heating, war, corruption scandals and even chagrin at how much better roads and facilities seem to be “abroad” compared to “at home”, is stoked by malign actors and exploited by the hostile states of Autocracy Inc.¹⁸⁵

Ressentiment, which features in chapter two in the discussion of mimesis¹⁸⁶ is a relational term which Nietzsche associated with the powerless, in for example denying themselves the goods they are denied by others.¹⁸⁷ Ressentiment thus differs from envy as in the latter, the goods one lacks are retained in the imagination as objects of desire. An example of ressentiment in action is the working-class elevation of cheap but filling foods such as oxtail, tripe, pigs’ feet and so on that they were once forced to eat by dint of necessity and which they now consume with pride as badges of distinction against the perceived fiddly, foppish unmanly foods prized by the middle-classes. From Nietzsche, Bourdieu (1984) called this amor fati, or the love of what one is condemned to, behaviour which John Elster describes as ‘sour grapes’ in relation to the fable where the fox eventually decided that it never wanted the grapes that it couldn’t reach in the first place on account that they were sour.

Jaeggi (2022) quotes Scheler’s¹⁸⁸ argument (which is virtually the same as that of René Girard in relation to external mediation), that ressentiment does not arise in highly structured stable societies that are based on caste or class where individuals accept their status. All that changes in a market society which prizes social mobility, where individuals are constantly told that they are unique, special and able to achieve their wildest dreams whilst also being responsible for their situation. Scheler (and Girard) argued that ressentiment (internal mediation) will be felt especially keenly in a liberal democracy where everyone is told that they are equal because they are accorded equal rights in a country that is otherwise riven by inequalities of wealth, property, and status.

If ressentiment is bound up with powerlessness then how come it is a constant feature of the rhetoric of those in power, employed among many others, by the current presidents of the USA and Russia, who are forever raging about the multifarious humiliations heaped on their suffering citizens by malevolent actors? This might partly be explained in relation to a sense of exceptionalism and entitlement, linked to a sense of real or imaginary loss of greatness in relation to some undeserving other that is experienced as a slight or a humiliation. Jaeggi (2022) extends ressentiment to middle-class experiences, such as that expressed by a male professor against his “woke” students, to argue that it can be experienced by those who are neither objectively deprived, nor objectively powerless.

Identification plays a crucial role here as it enables those born to privilege to assume the status of the victim by identifying with their plight. Pasieka (2024), whose study is mentioned above, describes the vicarious ressentiment expressed by the well-educated, well-to-do participants in her study of the European New Right. She describes their vision of the “downtrodden” ‘deserving poor” as based on social class (lower), ethnicity (white, ethnic nationals), and gender (heteronormative). The right-wing mendicants who serve this group can indulge in the pleasures of vicarious ressentiment by enjoying the vicarious experience of the humiliations experienced by those individuals to whom they provide succour and by venting their splenetic and sadistic impulses onto those other middle-class activists who purportedly serve the neoliberal state by pandering to the “underserving poor”, made up of immigrants and non-whites, LGBTQ+ and other minorities.

While Pasieka (2024) does not mention whether Stazek or the other middle-class informants to her study experienced a sense of dissonance between their privileged position and that of those whose plight they identified with, for those on the left, ressentiment can involve the active suppression, if not repression, of one’s privilege in the face of anxiety that one’s “real’ origins will be discovered by those with a more ‘authentic’ claim to victimhood. Those with actual experience of subordination can thus cannily deploy “authentic” markers of this as a trump card against their privileged counterparts. Thus, ever wary and potentially exposed, the privileged individual must double-down in their identity work and in their expression of vicarious ressentiment on behalf of those with whom they identify.

The stark implication of all of this for power is that resentment involves social and psychological processes of mimesis, identification, identity work and dissonance which are highly resistant to persuasion by rational argument. This presents something of a challenge to one of my central goals, which is to re-assert the importance of ascertaining the facts as a means to try, so far as possible, to arrive at something close to the truth, or at the very least, to point out factual discrepancies in the accounts offered by others. The prospect for achieving this in situations where identity is at stake is almost impossible, given the likelihood that facts will be tailored so as to fit the prevalent world-view of the protagonist who has as much interest in truth as a fly on the wall. If we are indeed heading towards an era where what might says is right, where the prevalent emotion is fear, what hope can there be for rational discussion and debate in an environment where “silence like a cancer grows’?¹⁸⁹

From the above, the following chapters six through nine should perhaps be considered redundant, as they describe relations of power that persisted in a bygone era before ‘Big Tech’ got into bed with the US democrats from the Clinton era onwards to ensure that they looked benevolently on regulation of this now poisonous industry. Then along came “Trump-47” like an elephant on the rampage that sought to overturn everything that is consensual and democratic in its wake and ruthlessly trampled over anyone who had contested him.”Artificial Intelligence” has been heralded by leaders as the saviour that will rescue all of humanity from years of stagnation , and is certainly artificial, but has already flung many would-be recruits out of their prospective jobs onto the brink of penury. In the climate-denial of those who know the reality, who are paying billions in their futile bid to to escape the planet they are helping to destroy, these people who unfortunately for the rest of us have read the novels of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling literally. painted by ill-liberal regimes today, whose electorates seem blinded to what is happening right before very eyes, of havoc wrought by massive oscillations in the climate that is wreaking havoc on a grand scale that anyone can observe increasingly before their own eyes but if not then daily on any news channel they may choose of devastation brought on by drought, excessive rainfall, soaring and crashing temperatures, to the extent of threatening to shut down deep sea currents and a crash in the number of species on the planet. Some, such as ultra-messianic ‘national christians’ actually work towards the apocalypse. At this time of crisis, as it deepens, one wonders, will anything ever be the same again, or are we entering a new epoch?

References and Further Reading

Amico, L. (2020). Do democracy and capitalism need each other? Harvard Business Review, 11th March.

Arrow, K. J., & G. Debreu, (1954). Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy. Econometrica, 22(3), 265–290. https://doi.org/10.2307/1907353

Arrow, K. J. (1974). General Economic Equilibrium: Purpose, Analytic Techniques, Collective Choice. The American Economic Review, 64(3), 253–272. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1808881

Aufheben, (1998). The politics of anti-road struggle and the struggles of anti-road politics: the case of the No M11 Link Road campaign. In, George McKay (ed) DIY Culture: Party and protest in nineties Britain, London: Verso, 100-129.

Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76(2), 169–217. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830482

Becker, G. S., (1962). Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory. Journal of Political Economy, 70(1), 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1827018

Becker, G. S., & Chiswick, B. R. (1966). Education and the Distribution of Earnings. The American Economic Review, 56(1/2), 358–369. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1821299

Benquet, M. & T. Bourgeron (2022)., Alt-Finance: How the City of London Bought Democracy, Pluto Press

Bevan, G. & C. Hood, (2006). What’s measured is what matters: targets and gaming in the English public health system. Public Administration, 84(3), 517-538.

Blaskow, N. (2022). Girard Contests Nietzsche: A case of Misplaced Resentment - Dionysos and the Crucified. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Bangor University.

Boltanski, l. & E Chiapello, (2018). The new spirit of capitalism, Gregory Elliott (Trans.), NY: Verso.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, London: Routledge.

Brown, Wendy, (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution, Near Future Series, Zone Books.

Callison, W & Q. Slobodian, (2021), Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol, Boston Review, 12th January.

Campbell, C. (2004) The Citizen-Consumer: Is this Term an Oxymoron?' draft paper presented at the Consumers as Citizens seminar, 22 April, HM Treasury, London.

Coase, R. H. (1960). The Problem of Social Cost. The Journal of Law & Economics, 3, 1–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/724810

Colman, A.M., (2016). Race differences in IQ: Hans Eysenck's contribution to the debate in the light of subsequent research, Personality and Individual Differences, 103(Dec), 182-189.

Crane, A. (2013).Modern slavery as a management practice: exploring the conditions and capabilities for worker exploitation. Academy of Management Review, 38(1), 49-69.

Crane, A., Matten, D., & Moon, J. (2008). Corporations and Citizenship: Business, Responsibility and Society. Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511488542

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¹ For instance, John Gray (2023).

² Vaidhyanathan, S. (2025). With the 21st century a quarter complete, illiberal democracy is the new global norm, The Guardian, 7th January.

³ Estimates are that 5.7 billion people in the world now live under authoritarian rule. See for instance, Lindberg, S.I. (2023). The world is becoming increasingly authoritarian, but there is hope. University of Gothenburg, 2nd March.

⁴ In The New Leviathans, John Gray (2023: 40-42) argues that in contrast to democracies the shaping of the state as we see it today in India under Narendra Modi, and in China, under Xi Jinping, has been influenced by illiberal Western ideas such as that peddled by Carl Schmitt, a one-time Nazi, who argued contrary to Hobbes, that the role of Leviathan is not to protect the people from insecurity and violence, but rather to protect a unified people, which in Modi’s India refers to Hindus, thus excluding Sikhs and Muslims, while in Xi’s China, it refers to Han, and the exclusion and persecution of minorities such as Uighurs and Tibetans.

⁵ Klein, D.B. (2014). The origins of liberalism. The Atlantic, 13th Feb.

⁶ In his review of Jean Jaurès History of the French Revolution, Philippe Marlière describes this was essentially liberal in tone but with the establishment of the First Republic of 1792 there began the process movement towards a socialist state which would recognize the Rights of Man and the Citizen and extend economic rights and social justice to workers (Marlière, 2023).

⁷ From the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these nds, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’

From the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Article two ‘The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.’

⁸ Source: John Locke (1690) Second Treatise of Government. American Declaration of Independence July 2nd 1776; Declaration of the Rights of Man, August 26th 1789.

⁹ ‘The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.’ – Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; approved by the National Assembly of France, 1789.

¹⁰ Wood, G.S. (1999). The Origins of American Democracy, or How the People Became

The Origins of American Democracy, or How the People Became Judges in Their Own Causes, The Sixty-Ninth Cleveland-Marshall Fund Lecture. Cleveland State Law Review, 47(3),

¹¹ Hirsch, Shirin, Protest and Peterloo, the story of 1819. People’s History Museum.

¹² The grant of the vote to all men in The Representation of the Peoples Act (1918) came just after the First World War during which millions of working-class men had given up their lives for king and country. To put it into perspective, 11% of men were entitled to vote in 1831, rising to 18% in 1832, 32% in 1868 and 63% in 1885. By 1918 all men aged over 21 and 57% of women had the vote, rising to almost 100% in 1929. (B.R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, Rallings and Thrasher, British Electoral Facts, 1832-2012.

¹³ Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1969.

¹⁴ Jefferson, T. (1776). The original draft of the Declaration of Independence, https://classicliberal.tripod.com/jefferson/origdecind.html However, it is argued by Republicans that the American revolution and constitution owed more to ancient Greek philosophy as relayed through Machiavelli and the English Commonwealthmen than it did to conceptions of liberal rights deriving from Locke (See, Kidd, C. (2024), Review of C.R. Arcenas, (2023). Antidote to Marx, Review of America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Chicago, London Review of Books, 4th Jan., 13-14.

¹⁵ ‘The conservative reaction triggered by the French Revolution and its aftermath weighed heavily on liberalism in England and on the continent well into the nineteenth century” Starr (2007: 27).

¹⁶ Bowcott, O.; B. Quinn & S. Carrell, (2019) Johnson's suspension of parliament unlawful, supreme court rules. The Guardian, 24th September. Some (including me) interpreted this ruling as preserving the authority of the courts as standing as a bastion of democracy against Executive power that sought to bypass Parliament. On the other side of the argument Robert Dahl (1989) described earlier similar actions by the US Supreme Court as forms of “guardianship” that usurp the democratic will of the electorate. The Johnston government’s argument was that it was merely trying to inscribe into law the “will of the people” expressed in the Brexit referendum which had since been constantly scuppered by Parliament. Donald Trump sought to ensure that the US Supreme Court would give him no trouble by appointing members amenable to his interests – a ploy that seems to have worked out to date. Today as I write this, in a momentous decision, a French court sentenced Marine Le Pen, head of National Rally in France, for misuse of funds, sentencing her to wear a tag for one year, with the important consequence that she was debarred from running for Presidential office in 2027. Her co-accused accused the courts of partisanship and breaching the separation of powers between legislature and the judiciary, an increasingly common tactic.

¹⁷ Groups such as Sovereign Citizens and Freemen-on-the-Land are growing in the USA, UK, Australia and even Singapore. These groups circulate pseudo-theories as the basis for their rejection of the authority of government and of the courts. Source: Matza, M., (2020). What is the sovereign citizen movement? BBC, 5th August.

¹⁸ Foucault, (2008: 283).

¹⁹ Such rulings eventually led the British government to legislate, leading to the first Sale of Goods Act (1893) which stated that goods must be fit for the purpose for which they were made. The Act was subsequently updated in 1979 and later supplemented by the Consumer Rights Act (2015).

²⁰ See Gey, (1993) for a critical comment on civic republicanism.

²¹ Dahl’s argument here is in line with Schumpeter’s (1943) utilitarian argument for minimal democracy and representative government.

²² Krouse, (1982: 444). Krouse also mentions that for Dahl this was just as well, given his belief that those citizens who are from the lower social classes tend towards authoritarianism and that their increased participation would fuel authoritarian sentiment (ibid.: 448).

²³ Ibid.: 452.

²⁴ Colin Kidd mentions that the famous commitment to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the US Declaration of Independence is taken by many to equate to capitalism, private property and the personal accumulation of wealth. While Locke has long been celebrated as the progenitor of the idea of the limited state, respect for individual liberty and the sanctity of private property more recently it has been argued that the American revolution and constitution were influenced more by ancient Greek philosophy filtered through the works of Machiavelli and the English Commonwealthmen, rather than rights-based liberalism. In this account Locke’s ideas were repackaged after the Second World War ‘as inoffensive bourgeois liberalism’ (Kidd, 2024, 18). Kidd, C. (2024), Antidote to Marx, Review of Rydell, C. (2023). America’s philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Chicago, London Review of Books, 4th January, 13-14.

²⁵ Foucault, (2021), Harcourt, (2012).

²⁶ Locke, J. in Two Treatises, 2.150, mentioned in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, (2005). Locke’s Political Philosophy, Part 6, Separation of Powers and the Dissolution of Government. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/

²⁷ Marshall, (1950), see also Lister (2005) for commentary and discussion of criticisms.

²⁸ Amos 8: 4-7.

²⁹ Czech Trade Inspection Authority, History of consumer rights protection. https://coi.gov.cz/en/about-ctia/history-of-consumer-rights-protection/

³⁰ The timeline runs broadly from the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Bill (1970), to The Disability Discrimination Act (1995), then ratification by the UK Government of United Nations Convention on the Rights of people with disabilities and passes the Single Equality Act (2010).

³¹ In the UK, gay relationships were illegal until 1967 when they were decriminalised for men over twenty-one provided they conducted were private. The overall narrative then changed from de-criminalisation to the demand for rights and following constant pressure, individuals were granted the same right as others to enter the armed forces, engage in civil partnerships and to marry and adopt children.

³² Harris, (2004, 137).

³³ Ibid., 142.

³⁴ Pope Francis, (2020). Fratelli Tutti; Encyclical letter on fraternity and social fellowship. The Holy See.

³⁵ Daniel Williams’ summary of a number of books from evangelicals makes for interesting reading. Williams, D. (2011). Evangelical economics; Re-examining Christian political culture from a marketplace perspective. Reviews in American History,39(1),175-184.

³⁶ Ibid. 174-175.

³⁷ MacLachlan and Trentmann (2004, 178) mention that the focus on legal rights by consumer activists was a distinctively American phenomenon, dating back to the War of Independence which in the 1920s and 1930s involved the NCL in campaigning against denial of rights for blacks and low wages for whites.

³⁸ Hershey, R.D. Jr., (1979). Mrs Thatcher’s Right Wing Guru, New York Times, 20th May: 7.

³⁹ Wight, J.B., (2002). The rise of Adam Smith: articles and citations 1970-1997. History of Political Economy, vol. 34(1): 55-82.

⁴⁰ Smith had a less rosy view of mercantilism that did Defoe, described by Tadajewski, (2015). “The function of the colonies was to inexpensive raw materials and purchase expensive finished goods; the role of the mother country to turn one into the other.” (Norman, 2018: 90).

⁴¹ In the Wealth of Nations, Smith contrasts the relative good fortune of the American colonies to the East Indies, which “was a fertile country…where subsistence should not be very difficult, where notwithstanding, three or four hundred thousand people die of hunger in one year through the actions of the East India Company. From chapter 8, Of the Wages of Labour, Book I, The Wealth of Nations. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h#chap15

Smith later contends that, “the monopoly of the colony trade, therefore, like all the other mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system, depresses the industry of all other countries, but chiefly that of the colonies, without in the least increasing, but on the contrary diminishing, that of the country in whose favour it is established.” Chapter 7: Of Colonies, Part II: Book IV, Causes of prosperity of New Colonies, Wealth of Nations. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h#chap15

⁴² Norman (2018: 243) links mercantilism to today’s “crony capitalism” as both involve, “political lobbying, anti-competitive regulation, egregious financial returns, growing inequality and loss of public trust”.

⁴³ From chapter 2, Of the Principle which gives occasion to the division of labour, Book I, The Wealth of Nations, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h#chap15

⁴⁴ From chapter 8: Conclusion of the mercantile system. Book IV: Principles of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h#chap15

⁴⁵ Norman, (2018, 243).

⁴⁶ Satz, (2010, 43).

⁴⁷ See, O’Boyle, (2007: 322); Starr, (2007). The earliest use of homo economicus was not by Mill but in 1883, when C. S. Devas in Groundwork of Economics, argued that ‘Mill has only explored homoe oeconomicus, or dollar-hunting animal’. From Charles Devas, Groundwork of Economics. OED.

⁴⁸ O’Boyle, (2007: 329).

⁴⁹ Dahl, (1998, 167). This is similar in tone to Hayek’s justification for the market based on how a city comes to be fed every day without external intervention.

⁵⁰ Martin Wolf also argues that despite their differences capitalism and democracy are compatible because they each rest on the principle of human agency; in capitalism the power of producers is ultimately reined in by the choices of a myriad individual consumers, whilst in democracy the power of the citizen exercised through the ballot box keeps the power politicians in check (Wolf, 2024).

⁵¹ Dahl, (1998, 173-175).

⁵² Ibid. 174.

⁵³ Wendy Brown,(2015) speaks of different modalities with which one can engaged with neoliberalism. In an interview Quinn Slobodian mentioned that one can frame neoliberalism in a number of ways; as an era in global capitalism; as a policy package linked to the “Washington consensus’; as a form of subjectivity; or as an intellectual movement. He contrasted his approach which focuses on the ‘supply’ side (Slobodian, 2025) with that of Perry Anderson (2025).

⁵⁴ Foucault, (2008).

⁵⁵ See Roszak, (1969) who memorably wrote that at the time the enemy was on the other side of the table. Boltanski and Chiapello (2006) loftily refer to this revolt as an ‘artistic critique’.

⁵⁶ One can forget that capital also includes the culture industries. The top rate of personal taxation in the UK in the 1960s was 90% and if you listen to track one, side one of Revolver (1966) you might possibly detect a hint of chagrin in the tone of these lovable countercultural capitalists.

⁵⁷ Quotes from Sally Fraser in Fraser & Jaeggi, (2018, 85, 86). I don’t agree entirely with this line of argument as this was also a time when anti-business sentiment was at its highest, when consumer interest groups were formed and business regulation enforced. See chapter three.

⁵⁸ While acknowledging the hard struggle for racial equality in the 1960s which continues today, in The Rebel Sell, Heath and Potter (2004) make the point that the youth culture of individualism, anti-authoritarianism and non-conformism was also steeped in commodity culture which it remade. There is an interesting psychological literature on how radicals from one stripe might flip to the other (Zmigrod et al., 2020). The life story of Jerry Rubin, founder of the Yippies is a case in point. See, Pace, E. (1994). Jerry Rubin 56, Flashy 60's Radical, Dies; 'Yippies' Founder and Chicago 7 Defendant. New York Times, 30th November.

⁵⁹ It is noteworthy that today the much lauded “efficient market hypothesis’ is now challenged by the “inelastic markets hypothesis” (Gabaix & Koijen, 2021).

⁶⁰ Hathaway, (2020).

⁶¹ Mann, G. (2023). Keynesianism in a foxhole. London Review of Books, vol. 45(8): 35.

⁶² Ibid., 33.

⁶³ Becker & Chiswick, (1966).

⁶⁴ Becker, (1962).

⁶⁵ Simon, (1957); Newell & Simon, (1958; 1972).

⁶⁶ The problem-solving terminology of initial state, goal state, operators and operator restrictions translates in the organisational context as audit, mission, objectives strategies and tactics.

⁶⁷ Thaler, (2015: 29)

⁶⁸ Kaletsky, A., (2009). Goodbye Homo Economicus. Prospect, 25th April. Mentions that David Hendry, until recently head of the Oxford economics department, noted that: “Economists critical of the rational expectations based approach have had great difficulty even publishing such views, or maintaining research fundinghttps://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/52872/goodbye-homo-economicus. See also Cassidy’s (2017) interview with Kahneman where the latter admitted that he wondered if Thaler would ever get tenure. Ironically, despite the objections of several academics, Thaler later took up a position at the University of Chicago.

⁶⁹ Sunstein & Thaler, (2008).

⁷⁰ Kahneman, Knetch & Thaler. (1991).

⁷¹ Thaler & Sunstein, (2003).

⁷² See Lazear, (2015). That there is no love lost between these two groups is testified to by Thaler (2016), who describes how neoliberals refused to acknowledge insights from psychology by questioning its evidential basis and that individuals behaved differently in competitive market situations. Tversky and Kahneman have been criticized by Gigerenzer on the methodological ground that their test of rationality was based on Bayesian inference, which humans are not very good at,(Gigerenzer, & Hoffrage,1995) rather than on frequencies, which they are good at (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996), such that humans are good intuitive statisticians who employ fast and frugal heuristics.

⁷³ Melé D. & Cantón (2014).

⁷⁴ As mentioned in chapter three, consumer researchers have long described differences between the idealised homo economicus and real consumer behaviour – see also Bevir and Trentmann, (2007, 2).

⁷⁵ Slobodian, (2025, 43-45).

⁷⁶ Eichmann in Stangeth, 2014: 217.

⁷⁷ Slobodian (2006, 183).

⁷⁸ Mencken in Rothbard,( 2007, 13).

⁷⁹ Rothbard, (2007, 17/18).

⁸⁰ Rothbard, (2007, 117).

⁸¹ T. Woods Jr., (Rothbard, 2007, xii).

⁸² See section on Friedman on Money, in, Rothbard, Murray N., (2002). Milton Friedman Unraveled. Journal of Libertarian Studies 16(4), 37–54.

⁸³ Rothbard, (2007, 23).

⁸⁴ Rothbard, (2007, 60).

⁸⁵ Rothbard, (2007, 87).

⁸⁶ Rothbard, (2007, 88).

⁸⁷ Rothbard, (2007, 88).

⁸⁸ Rothbard, (2007, 131).

⁸⁹ T. Woods Jr., in Rothbard, 2007, xiii).

⁹⁰ Rothbard, 2007, 43-45).

⁹¹ Gill, (1995).

⁹² Bevir & Trentmann, (2007, 2).

⁹³ Rosenfeld (2025), provides an illuminating account of the history of choice.

⁹⁴ Margaret Thatcher was a case in point. The government of the first woman Prime Minister of the UK greatly weakened the ability for professions such as medics, academics and lawyers to regulate their own affairs. Paradoxically, although she was committed to freedom government power over these institutions was strengthened during her tenure in office. See for example, Bogdanor, V. (2013). Thatcher’s academic paradox. Times Higher Education, 25th April). Herself a firm believer in merit and individual willpower, she did little to advance the interests of other women and was argued to have had a damaging effect on their prospects, (Stone-Lee, O. (2005). Thatcher’s role for women, BBC, 22nd November).

⁹⁵ The full story of the demise of TQM by quality assurance which was its supposedly outmoded antecedent has yet to be told. Dayton (2004) makes a start.

⁹⁶ A UK government review found that administrative bureaucracy for university research had increased. UK Government, (2022). Independent Review of Research Bureaucracy, Final Report, July. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-research-bureaucracy. The overall cost of REF 2021 was estimated to be £471 billion, an increase Neto, a.; A. Vingre, J. D’Hont, C. Vergara, K. Farla & P. Simmonds, (2023). REF 2021: Cost evaluation, Final Report. https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/9184/1/REF_2021_cost_evaluation_final_report.pdf

⁹⁷ See for example Bevin & Hood, (2006).

⁹⁸ Government services contracted out to the Big Four consultancies. £2.1 to £3.4 bn. Source, Consultancy UK, (2024). Government consultancy bill still £1 billion over pre-pandemic levels, 30th August.

⁹⁹ Grappi & Bagozzi, (2013).

¹⁰⁰ Source: World Economic Forum.

¹⁰¹ Williamson, John, (2005). The strange history of the Washington Consensus. Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, Winter 2004-5, vol 27(2):195-206.

¹⁰² Williamson. John (2005: 197). He later argues here that this should have gone further, by pressing for institutional reform and not just policy reform. In this paper he also expresses his strong disapproval of being blamed for devising a policy that has ‘brought misery and ruin in its wake; for example, by causing the collapse in Argentina” a claim he finds “extraordinary” because in his view, this collapse was brought about by commitment to an unrealistic exchange rate, which he had explicitly argued against (ibid.: 199). Williamson complains that it seems to him that most critics have not bothered to read his account. Here he contrasts his version of the Washington Consensus which called for a competitive exchange rate with the IMF policy for floating or fixed rates; secondly, that he argued for the limitation of capital flows to Foreign Direct Investment, which in his view was a “terrible” decision by the IMF, provoking the Asian crisis of 1997. On the plus side he praises the role of the IMF and World Bank in tackling institutional reforms that were not included in his original paper, involving matters of governance and corruption. Williamson also argues that to describe it as a “synonym for neoliberalism or market fundamentalism… is a thoroughly objectionable perversion of the original meaning” (ibid.: 201). Williamson counters by arguing that there was by comparison very little consensus in international financial circles around neoliberal policies such as supply-side economics, monetarism or minimal government” (ibid.: 202). In his view the prescription involved a “pretty reasonable view of the role of the Bretton-Woods institutions”.

¹⁰³ While quoted in the above footnote that he finds it ‘thoroughly objectionable’ that his prescription is neoliberal, many would argue that many of these policies are indeed compatible with a neoliberal orientation.

¹⁰⁴ Allegedly Joe Biden told coal-miners who were to be made redundant, “learn to code”. Source, Kelley, A. (2019). Biden tells coal miners to “learn to code”. The Hill, 31st December.

¹⁰⁵ Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution, (2023). The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/27/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-renewing-american-economic-leadership-at-the-brookings-institution/

¹⁰⁶ Tett, G. (2025). America’s new “patriotic’ capitalism. Financial Times, 30th-31st August, 9.

¹⁰⁷ See for example, Peters, (2017).

¹⁰⁸ Benhabib, (1999, 414-416).

¹⁰⁹ See Crane (2013) as an example of growing academic interest in “modern” slavery.

¹¹⁰ There is a fascinating video clip featuring Friedman responding to a question from Michael Moore about the notorious case of the design of the Ford Pinto, where Ford executives used cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to insert a crucial device to prevent death in the event that the petrol tank exploded. This was available on a number of sites including this one at the University of Pennsylvania. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_gU50mfehI See See Cullen et al., (1994) and Dowie, (1994) for discussion of this case.

¹¹¹ This comes from Soper’s (2007) argument – I did not have access to the paper by Campbell, (2004). This issue is discussed further in chapter six in relation to Wal-Mart and Levi-Strauss.

¹¹² Ibid., 205.

¹¹³ Hambrick & Wowak, (2021).

¹¹⁴ Ben & Jerry’s, Our values, activism and mission. https://www.benjerry.co.uk/values

¹¹⁵ Hoskins, P. (2025) BBC co-founder quits over social activism row, BBC News, 13th September.

¹¹⁶ Da Silva, J. (2025). Ben & Jerry’s boss “ousted over political activism”. BBC News, 19th March.

¹¹⁷ Hartman, C.L & & E.R. Stafford, (2006). Chilling With Greenpeace, From the Inside Out, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer.

¹¹⁸ Crane, Matten & Moon, (2008, 26).

¹¹⁹ Reference is on page 30 to Dahl, (1972).

¹²⁰ Gismond, M. (2020). The untold study of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Canadian Geographic, 2nd May.

¹²¹ Hirsch, M.L. (2015). America’s company towns; then and now. Smithsonian Magazine, 4th September.

¹²² Crenson, (1971).

¹²³ Crane, Matten & Moon, (2008, 87).

¹²⁴ Ibid., 90.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 79.

¹²⁶ Ross, K. (2023) Climate change and white supremacy are not problems for US, Ramaswamy argues. ABC News, 20th September. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/climate-change-white-supremacy-problems-us-ramaswamy-argues/story?id=103307611

¹²⁷ Pitcher, J. (2025) BlackRock drops DEI references in annual report. The Wall Street Journal, 26th February.

¹²⁸ Neal, G. (2023). Legal troubles in the magic kingdom. Harvard Law Today, Faculty Scholarship. https://hls.harvard.edu/today/rebecca-tushnet-analyzes-disneys-lawsuit-against-ron-desantis/

¹²⁹ I am all too familiar with my geocentric view of what constitutes ‘West’ and ‘East’, but decided to stick with this because the alternatives were simply too cumbersome.

¹³⁰ In the USA between 1999 and 2008 amounts owed on instalment mortgages related lines of credit tripled from $3.3 trillion to $10 trillion. See, Brown, M.; A. Haughwout, D. Lee,

& W. van der Klaauw, (2013). The Financial Crisis at the Kitchen Table: Trends in Household Debt and Credit. Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 19(2), p.3

¹³¹ Tett, G. (2025). The psychology of CEO loyalty to Trump. Financial Times, 6th-7th Sept., 11.

¹³² Fontanella-Khan, J.; G. Steer, C. Jones & A. Reiter, (2025). A calculated silence. The Big Read, Financial Times, 30th-31st August, 7.

¹³³ Anderson, (2025), Regime change in the West, London Review of Books, 3rd April, 6.

¹³⁴ Jones, J.M. (2024). Record Low in U.S. Satisfied With Way Democracy Is Working. Gallup, 5th January.

¹³⁵ Fetterolf, J. & S.H. Ramones, (2024). 72% of Americans say the U.S. used to be a good example of democracy, but isn’t anymore. Pew Research Center, 10th July. A UK survey of those 16-29 found 27% said they would prefer a dictatorship over democracy whilst 63% thought democracy is in trouble (Keate, N., (2025). Majority of UK’s young adults ‘concerned’ about democracy, new poll says, Politico, 31st March.

¹³⁶ Crane et al. (2008, 84).

¹³⁷ Especially following the imposition of financial ‘haircuts’ to Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, collectively disparaged as PIGS, imposed by the European Bank.

¹³⁸ such as UKIP in Britain, the Freedom Party, in Austria and National Rally, in France and on the left, with Podemos, in Spain, Syriza and the Five Star movement in Italy and of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.

¹³⁹ Details of this and related conspiracies are discussed in the BBC Radio 4 series, The Coming Storm, narrated by Gabriel Gatehouse, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324r

¹⁴⁰ See for example Schewizer, P. (2011). Throw them all out: How politicians and their friends got rich off stock tips, land deals and cronyism that would send the rest of us to prison. Boston, New York: Houghton-Mifflin.

¹⁴¹ Fukuyama, F. (2024). Trump unleashed: what now for American. Financial Times, Life and Arts, Saturday 9th November: 1-2.

¹⁴² This led to controversy in the Scottish government including a purge of “gender critical” feminists from the Green Party. In 2024 the UK Supreme Court clarified that the meaning of “woman” in the UK is

¹⁴³ Sex Matters, Keeping track of Stonewall. https://sex-matters.org/about-us/what-we-are-up-against/keeping-track-of-stonewall/

¹⁴⁴ Nolan (2021). Stonewall. Nolan Investigates, BBC, NI. (ten episodes). https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/p09yjmph

¹⁴⁵ See Sex Matters website (op. cit.).

¹⁴⁶ Foster, A., (2021). Review of two events involving external speakers. University of Essex, 17th May. https://www.essex.ac.uk/blog/posts/2021/05/17/review-of-two-events-with-external-speakers

¹⁴⁷ Moorhead, J. (2021) Kathleen Stock: taboo around gender has a chilling effect on academics. The Guardian, 22nd May.

¹⁴⁸ Siddiqui, H. (2021). Stonewall is at the centre of toxic debate on trans rights and gender identity. The Guardian, 5th June. Tatchell, 2019 he argued that Stonewall had lost the original vision espoused by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). See Tatchell, P. (2019). Stonewall sparked a global LGBT+ freedom movement. Today’s activists have lost the Stonewall vision, 19th June. Peter Tatchell Foundation. https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/stonewall-sparked-a-global-lgbt-freedom-movement/

¹⁴⁹ See Van Dreew et al., (2025). This study of “ordinary American” understandings of “woke” showed a clear divide between Republicans and Democrats with those in the middle being more varied in descring its meaning. The authors describe the coaptation of the term by Republicans such as Ron DeSantis, “Florida is where woke goes to die”.

¹⁵⁰ Despite that gender politics was reputedly a low priority for most voters, the Trump2024 campaign recognised the salience of abortion and gender politics to conservative Christians some of whom formed part of his “base”, whilst others who had been lifelong democrats, were ripe for turning on this issue. Trump made his position clear well-ahead of the election, then spending over $21 million on ‘anti-woke’ advertisements in the runup, attacking Kamala Harris for, among other things, supporting “taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners”. The sub-text was clear; sex-changes for prisoners were a priority for the democrats at a time of rising anxiety over the effects of inflation, when many were reportedly skipping meals to fund mortgage payments. (References, Migdon, B. & J. Manchester, (2023). Republicans seize on transgender rights ahead of 2024. The Hill, 22nd March; Alfonseca, K. & S.R. Kim, (2021). Trump allies are pouring millions into anti-trans election ads as election nears, ABC News, 21st October.

¹⁵¹ Callison, W. & Q. Slobodian, (2021.) Coronapolitics: from the Reichstag to the Capitol. The Boston Review, 12th January.

¹⁵² Agnieska, (2024, 60, 116).

¹⁵³ Anne Applebaum describes the fixation of Russian media on the USA and how it has sought to capitalize on Western discontent by promoting itself as the last bastion and protector of white, Christian values; “Putin has a following on the authoritarian far right having convinced some native conservatives that Russia is a “white Christian state”. In reality Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya which is part of the Russian Federation is governed in part by elements of sharia law and has killed gay men in the interests of Islamic purity.” (Applebaum, 2024, 76).

¹⁵⁴ Ibid., 100.

¹⁵⁵ “We like Catholicism without the Christian content”:, Ibid., 139.

¹⁵⁶ Schmidt, S.K. (2020). An institutional mismatch: why ‘taking back control’ proved so appealing, LSE Blogs, 7th May.

¹⁵⁷ Benquet & Bourgeron,( 2022). See for example, Table 3, p. 33 and Table 11, p. 41.

¹⁵⁸ Ibid., 105.

¹⁵⁹ Ibid., 104.

¹⁶⁰ ibid., 104.

¹⁶¹ Geoghegan, P. (2023). At NatCon London, Short Cuts, London Review of Books, 45(11), 1st June.

¹⁶² National Conservativism: A Statement of Principles. https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/

¹⁶³ Ibid, 30.

¹⁶⁴ ibid., 32.

¹⁶⁵ “Multilevel cultural evolution continues to operate in the present. The most successful large-scale societies are those that manage to coordinate activity and suppress disruptive forms of within-

society competition. Large-scale societies that are dominated by small groups of elites tend to fail at the societal level (Wilson et al., 2015, 139).

¹⁶⁶ The term coined by Gottfried and Spencer in 2008 that packages everything on the right from anarcho-capitalists to conspiracy theorists.

¹⁶⁷ Slobodian argues that Mises work was more conducive to their way of thinking because, ‘he explicitly associated differences in certain traits with racial groups”, for instance in relation to intelligence and willpower (ibid., 48).

¹⁶⁸ Although Colman broadly accepts the existence of a “Black-White Gap” in IQ, a proportion of which is inherited, he argues that this could be entirely due to environmental factors (Colman, 2016). Others like Kamin, have called Lynn’s methods and reporting into question. One review found found that Lynn had misreported and omitted some of his own data and that when this was taken into account his rankings of nations was no longer stable (Thomas, 2011). Additionally, instead of representative samples Lynn’s dataset comprised a hotchpotch of many convenience samples, for example IQ for Eritrea was estimated entirely on scores from children living in orphanages (Sear, 2022). Following an outcry, Elsevier initiated a review of Lynn’s research (see report by Devlin, H. & D. Pegg, (2024). Publisher reviews national IQ research by British ‘race scientist’ Richard Lynn. The Guardian, 10th December. Hans Eysenck, another prominent researcher of IQ has also had his methods questioned The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and Sage mentioned in relation to one of his papers, “Concerns with the validity of the datasets, including the “recruitment of participants, administration of measures, reliability of outcome ascertainment, biases in data collection, absence of relevant covariates, and selection of cases analysed in each article.” The article from Retraction Watch mentions that seventy-one of Eysenck’s papers have been listed as of concern. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/08/77-year-old-paper-by-controversial-psychiatrist-hans-eysenck-earns-an-expression-of-concern/

¹⁶⁹ Racial Austrians offered a racialised interpretation of Hayek’s savanna story to argue that populations reared in warm climates failed to develop higher mental faculties because they did not face the challenges confronted by those living in cooler climates (Slobodian, 2925, 63).

¹⁷⁰ Slobodian,( 2025, 78/79).

¹⁷¹ Ibid., 70

¹⁷² Slobodian, (2025, 81) mentions that neoliberals had made this argument since the 1930s.

¹⁷³ Ibid., 87.

¹⁷⁴ There are lots of potential references that could be cited here. For relatively recent ones see for instance, Dorling, D. (2025). The next crisis; what we think about the future and what we can do about it, Verso and also De Haas, H. (2023). How migration really works, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

¹⁷⁵ Slobodian, (2025, 91).

¹⁷⁶ Slobodian, (2025, 167).

¹⁷⁷ Barnett, A. (2025). Mapped: Donald Trump’s transatlantic anti-green network. DeSmog, 21st January.

¹⁷⁸ Guardian columnist Luke Harding posted a photo on X of Matthew Elliott who was awarded a peerage by Liz Truss, attending an event in Moscow in 2012 which Harding claims was organised by a Russian spy. https://x.com/lukeharding1968/status/1741029311505952969

¹⁷⁹ Farand, C. & M. Mat Hope (2018). Matthew and Sarah Elliott: How a UK Power Couple Links US Libertarians and Fossil Fuel Lobbyists to Brexit. DeSmog, 18th November.

¹⁸⁰ Snowdon, P. & A. McElvoy, (2024). Meet JD Vance’s philosopher king. Politico, 19th September.

¹⁸¹ Ibid., 58.

¹⁸² Slobodian, (2025, 47).

¹⁸³ From a marketing perspective to say that a person is “suffering from halitosis” is preferable to “bad breath’ by adding a pseudo-scientific gloss and the impression that this is an illness. The reference to Listerine is deliberate because it was Gerald Lambert, whose father owned the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, who discovered the Latin term “halitosis” and used it in their advertising. See, Clarke, L. (2015). How Halitosis Became a Medical Condition With a “Cure”. Smithsonian Magazine, 29th January. Cod Latin terms are frequently used by marketers in making dubious health claims today. Pasi Falk, (1994), in a chapter on the genealogy of advertising notes that this focus on problem-solution advertising changed to focus more on the positive register. David Ogilvy was a well-known exponent of the deficit-solution approach. See, Ogilvy, D.; (1983) Ogilvy on advertising, Crown.

¹⁸⁴ Slobodian, (2025, 105).

¹⁸⁵ Applebaum (2024) refers to the extraordinary level of cooperation between autocratic regimes in China, Russia and its satellite states including Belarus, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba and many others as ‘Autocracy Inc.” because of their common cause to undermine democracy and to create a new world order based on autocratic rule. The rising power of this axis and the decline of the USA were particularly evident in the meeting that took place between Chinese, Russian and North Korean leaders in Beijing in September 2025, and in the massive military display that accompanied this which was ostensibly to celebrate the anniversary of the Second World War.

¹⁸⁶ For obvious reasons Nietzsche and Girard are scarcely mentioned in the same breath such is their division on questions of Christianity. However it is argued that they can productively be read together. (Blaskow, 2022).

¹⁸⁷ Jaeggi, (2022) offers a very finely worked out piece on ressentiment that clearly identifies its key features as at its heart inter-individual, pertaining to social comparison, “what I do not have while others have it”. He acknowledges a discrepancy in that ressentiment is linked by Nietzsche to powerlessness, discussing Scheler’s argument that this lack of power,’ is something that the individuals in question impose on themselves”. Ressentiment is triggered by impotence and is a refusal to engage in revenge.

¹⁸⁸ Scheler, Max.(1994). Ressentiment. Lewis A. Coser (ed.), William W. Holdheim (Trans.). Marquette University Press.

¹⁸⁹ Line from ‘Sound of Silence’ by Paul Simon, (1966).