Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. He is the author, most recently, of The Prince of This World and Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (both with Stanford University Press) and the translator of many works of Giorgio Agamben. Below is an interview with him, followed by an excerpt from his book.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
My previous book, The Prince of This World, explored the origins and modern legacy of the figure of the devil in Christian theology. The second half of the book explored the ways that theologians made the devil into a kind of testing ground for ideas about freedom and moral responsibility in a world created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God. The problem of what it means to be free in relation to such a God—and particularly what it could possibly mean to rebel against him—was a difficult one, and medieval thinkers took it in perhaps unexpected directions. On the one hand, they used creaturely freedom as a way of insulating God from responsibility for the evil, injustice, and suffering we see in the world—all of those things are not God’s will, but result from the free choices of creatures to move away from God’s perfect plan. On the other hand, and perhaps contradictorily, creaturely freedom provided a way of guaranteeing that there would be some amount of rebellion and evil within God’s creation. The reason this is desired is that theologians believed that God showed forth his glory more clearly by bringing good out of evil than he could have in a world where every creature obeyed perfectly and seamlessly. By transforming our bad choices into a positive result, he shows himself to be more wise, powerful, and far-seeing.
Hence freedom is a mechanism for generating blameworthiness among creatures and simultaneously a way of generating opportunities for God to show forth his glory. And I argued that, contrary to our common sense views about freedom as the foundation for human dignity, the modern world had inherited this toxic and contradictory notion of freedom. In the book, I was focused on providing a historical and analytic account, and so I gestured vaguely at “the modern secular world” as a whole. But I had long been interested in the critique of the contemporary political-economic regime known as neoliberalism, and I came to see it as an especially intense form of the trap of freedom that I had diagnosed. Initially, I thought this comparison could be made in the space of an article-length argument, but after the 2016 election, I saw that it helped me to understand the continuity and discontinuity between the neoliberal order at the so-called Age of Trump. So ultimately I wrote this book as a book because I was trying to come to terms, not just with Trump, but about what his emergence told us about the fault-lines in neoliberalism itself.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
The response has been mostly positive so far, to the extent that I am able to tell. I have had the opportunity to give a number of interviews and talks on the book, far more than for any of my previous works. Clearly this book is responding to questions that a lot of people have been asking in the wake of the election.
To some extent, this is surprising to me, because my worry was that my analysis of neoliberalism would seem to be a kind of post-mortem—a case of Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Also surprising has been the fact that most of my interviewers have been much more concerned about neoliberalism than about Trump. It always does come up, inevitably, but almost as an afterthought. I take this as a sign that people understand that, contrary to predictions of some leftist commentators, Trump does not represent a genuine break with neoliberalism. The relationship is much more complex and ambiguous than that.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
I am very systematic with my writing, and my writing routine has become pretty established over the years. I think I’ve reached a good place where I’m able to take advantage of small blocks of time (rather than waiting for an open day to materialize, as many academics tend to do). Here are some of my main techniques:
- Break your argument into manageable chunks — while I don’t usually write out an explicit outline, I do go over it in my head, trying to break down my argument into a few key points and come up with a plausible order for them. I then set myself the task during each writing period of discussing the next point in line, in such a way as to set myself up to discuss the next point in turn — and in my experience, this technique leads to better “flow” (a major, indeed even obsessive goal for my writing) and clarity of organization at the same time that it makes the work process more manageable, so that it benefits both the reader and the writer. I’ve found over time that it’s best to let this process be somewhat intuitive, because if my ordering feels artificial to me, I’ll inevitably find myself writing paragraph after paragraph justifying the ordering (basically to myself). Another benefit of letting it be more intuitive is found in my next technique:
- Allow it to be exploratory — nothing impedes the writing process like knowing exactly what you want to write. If you plan in too much detail, it will seem to be “done” to you already, such that actually writing it out will feel like a pointless hoop to jump through. My organization technique feeds into this need for freshness and exploration, because each day I know that I need to get from point A to point B, yet I almost never decide in advance exactly how to do that. The result is that the writing itself feels like a learning experience, and I inevitably come up with ideas along the way that I likely never would have thought of if I’d used a more lock-step organizational approach. Yet I also can sometimes wind off getting off on tangents, which leads me to my next technique:
- Save everything you delete — one of my biggest liabilities as a writer early in grad school was my desire to write the final draft on the first try. This can be manageable for undergrad papers and even sometimes for grad seminar papers, particularly because I do so much mental planning work before I start writing — yet for a book-length project, it’s just impossible. I knew I would need to rewrite, yet the rewriting process intimidated me, as I could only conceive of it as tearing out the whole thing and writing a new attempt at a final draft from scratch. To be past this mental block, I started to keep a “remnants” file where I could cut and paste anything I felt I needed to tear out but could also trick myself into believing that my work on that passage hadn’t been wasted because I could reincorporate it later. My experience is that if I don’t reuse a cut passage quickly, I normally won’t use it at all — so that the remnants file becomes either an island of misfit paragraphs or else a kind of holding tank allowing me to reorganize by pasting sections in a different order onto a blank page. (Yesterday, though, I did manage to reuse a long-orphaned paragraph that I’d cut from my introduction months ago.)
Excerpt from Neoliberalism’s Demons
What is Neoliberalism?
One of the consequences of the 2016 US election that most directly im- pacts my project is the emergence of the term neoliberalism as an object of mainstream political debate. Unfortunately, the discussion has resulted in more confusion around a term that was already much contested, as defenders of Clinton have tended to claim that neoliberalism is nothing more than a term of abuse and that what Sanders supporters tar as neoliberalism is sim- ply identical to conventional liberalism. These new developments compound the difficulties stemming from the idiosyncratic US usage of liberal to mean “moderately left of center” and the similarities between neoliberalism and the “classical liberalism” advocated by libertarians.
Thus, while I flesh out my own demonic definition of neoliberalism in the chapters that follow, some initial clarification is in order. I will begin with the relationship between neoliberalism and “classical” or laissez-faire liberalism. The latter term refers to the economic order that prevailed during the “long nineteenth century,” during which all the major European powers were committed to the free operation of a global capitalist market. In this paradigm economics and politics are two separate realms that operate best when the state resists the urge to meddle in the economy. As Karl Polanyi shows in The Great Transformation, the establishment and maintenance of the classical liberal order required considerable state action, and the state was continually forced to ameliorate the destructive effects of unfettered market forces through a series of more or less ad hoc measures. Yet compared with the dominant model that emerged in the United States and Western Eu- rope in the wake of the Second World War, the state’s role in relation to the economy was much more circumscribed in classical liberalism.
The First World War and subsequent cataclysms discredited the classical liberal model, whose promise of endless peace and prosperity (at least within the European sphere) failed spectacularly. As Polanyi shows, this collapse led to various experiments with more state-driven economic models, including Soviet Communism, Fascism and National Socialism, and Roosevelt’s New Deal. The model that ultimately took hold in the major Western countries after the Second World War has gone under a number of different names, including social democracy or the welfare state. Within the United States it was for a time known, confusingly enough, as neoliberalism, in recognition of the ways that the market forces familiar from classical liberalism were being intentionally harnessed and redirected toward socially beneficial ends. Ultimately, despite this clear opposition to classical liberalism, the term lib- eralism (sans neo-) came to prevail as a designation for the postwar American political settlement—a strange state of affairs that continues to generate considerable confusion. In recognition of this shift in linguistic usage, the faithful remnant in the United States who, inspired by the pulp novels of Ayn Rand, advocated a straightforward return to the prewar laissez-faire order came to call themselves libertarians.
For the purposes of the present study, I have chosen to designate the postwar order as “Fordism.” There are many reasons for this choice. From an academic standpoint it is a nod to the Marxist analysts who have shaped my understanding of the dynamics of capitalism in the twentieth century, and in contrast to a name like “postwar liberalism,” it has the benefit of defamiliarizing the postwar model and emphasizing our historical distance from it. On a more personal level it reflects my upbringing in the suburbs of Flint, Michigan, a city that has been utterly devastated by the transition to neoliberalism. As I lived through the slow-motion disaster of the gradual withdrawal of the auto industry, I often heard Henry Ford’s dictum that a company could make more money if the workers were paid enough to be customers as well, a prin- ciple that the major US automakers were inexplicably abandoning. Hence I find it to be an elegant way of capturing the postwar model’s promise of creating broadly shared prosperity by retooling capitalism to produce a consumer society characterized by a growing middle class—and of emphasizing the fact that that promise was ultimately broken.
By the mid-1970s, the postwar Fordist order had begun to break down to varying degrees in the major Western countries. While many powerful groups advocated a response to the crisis that would strengthen the welfare state, the agenda that wound up carrying the day was neoliberalism, which was most forcefully implemented in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher and in the United States by Ronald Reagan. And although this transformation was begun by the conservative party, in both countries the left-of-center or (in American usage) “liberal” party wound up embracing neoliberal tenets under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, ostensibly for the purpose of directing them toward progressive ends. With the context of current debates within the US Democratic Party, this means that Clinton acolytes are correct to claim that “neoliberalism” just is liberalism but only to the extent that, in the contemporary United States, the term liberalism is little more than a word for whatever the policy agenda of the Democratic Party happens to be at any given time.
Though politicians of all stripes at times used libertarian rhetoric to sell their policies, the most clear-eyed advocates of neoliberalism realized that there could be no simple question of a “return” to the laissez-faire model. Rather than simply getting the state “out of the way,” they both deployed and transformed state power, including the institutions of the welfare state, to reshape society in accordance with market models. In some cases this meant creating markets where none had previously existed, as in the privatization of education and other public services. In others it took the form of a more general spread of a competitive market ethos into ever more areas of life—so that we are encouraged to think of our reputation as a “brand,” for instance, or our social contacts as fodder for “networking.” Whereas classical liberalism insisted that capitalism had to be allowed free rein within its sphere, under neoliberalism capitalism no longer has a set sphere. We are always “on the clock,” always accruing (or squandering) various forms of financial and social capital.
Why Political Theology?
Thus neoliberalism is more than simply a formula for economic policy. It aspires to be a complete way of life and a holistic worldview, in a way that previous models of capitalism did not. It is this combination of policy agenda and moral ethos that leads me to designate neoliberalism as a form of political theology. As with the term neoliberalism, my fully articulated view of the latter term will unfold over the course of the entire argument of this book, and so I will again limit myself to addressing some initial sources of confusion.
Here the term theology is likely to present the primary difficulty, as it seems to presuppose some reference to God. Familiarity with political theol- ogy as it has conventionally been practiced would reinforce that association. Schmitt’s Political Theology and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies both focused on the parallels between God and the earthly ruler, and much subsequent work in the field has concentrated on the theological roots of po- litical concepts of state sovereignty. Hence the reader may justly ask whether I am claiming that neoliberalism presupposes a concept of God.
The short answer is no. I am not arguing, for example, that neoliberalism “worships” the invisible hand, the market, money, wealthy entrepreneurs, or any other supposed “false idol,” nor indeed that it is somehow secretly “religious” in the sense of being fanatical and unreasoning. Such claims presuppose a strong distinction between the religious and the secular, a dis- tinction that proved foundational for the self-legitimation of the modern secular order but that has now devolved into a stale cliché. As I will discuss in the chapters that follow, one of the things that most appeals to me about political theology as a discipline is the way that it rejects the religious/secular binary.
That binary conditions the way people think about theology, leading them to view it as a discourse that, in contrast with rational modes of inquiry like philosophy and science, is concerned exclusively with God, is based on faith claims as opposed to verifiable facts, and is ultimately always dogmatic and close-minded. Yet attempts to establish a qualitative distinction between the- ology and philosophy or science on these grounds fail completely. If discourse about God is the defining feature, then Aristotle, Descartes, and Newton must be dismissed as mere theologians. If unverifiable premises mark the difference, then Euclidean geometry is the vilest form of fundamentalism.
Coming at the problem from the other direction, theology has always been about much more than God. Even the simplest theological systems have a lot to say about the world we live in, how it came to be the way it is, and how it should be. Those ideals are neither true nor false in an empiri- cal sense, nor is it fair to say that believers accept them blindly. Every such theological ideal ultimately comes to depend on cultural inertia, but it could not take root and spread in the first place if it were not appealing and persua- sive. It is this world-ordering ambition of theology, which relies on people’s convictions about how the world is and ought to be, that for me represents a more fruitful distinction between theological discourse and philosophical or scientific discourses, at least as the latter tend to be practiced in the contem- porary world.
It is in this sense that I consider neoliberal ideology a form of theology—it is a discourse that aims to reshape the world. But here another question arises: why not simply call it an ideology? Why court misleading preconceptions about theology when an alternative exists? I answer that the term ideology carries its own preconceptions with it, which I am even more concerned to avoid. The term necessarily evokes the Marxist theory of ideol- ogy, which in its most simplistic forms maintains that ideology is merely a secondary effect of the development of the economic mode of production. This reductionism carries with it the implication that ideology, as an illusion propagated by the bourgeoisie, can be replaced by the true view of things, namely Marxist science. While the Marxist tradition has consistently tried to break free of this one-sided reductionism—an attempt that has often in- volved an engagement with theology, most famously in Althusser’s evocation of Pascal in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”—it remains an inescapable center of gravity for the theory of ideology. Moreover, as I will show in subsequent chapters, this reductionism has made it very difficult for Marxist critics to grasp the distinctiveness of neoliberalism. Hence I chose a different path.
I will begin to lay out my own account of political theology in the first chapter, but I hope it is already clear that I conceive of the discipline as more than simply the study of parallels between political and theological concepts. On the most fundamental level, I regard political theology as the study of systems of legitimacy, of the ways that political, social, economic, and reli- gious orders maintain their explanatory power and justify the loyalty of their adherents. I maintain that we have misunderstood neoliberalism if we do not recognize that it, too, is a system concerned with its own self-legitimation. In this respect the account of neoliberalism that comes closest to my approach is Will Davies’s The Limits of Neoliberalism […] Davies’s sociological approach takes him into territories I am not trained to explore, including the internal culture of regulatory agencies tasked with implementing neoliberal policies. In my view he provides an irrefutable demonstration of the fact that neoliberalism really is a consciously embraced ideology that has worked its way through concrete institutions of governance, while at the same time accounting for the developments and apparent contradictions in neoliberal thought and practice over the last several decades.
The obvious difference in scope and approach between our respective projects, despite our similar starting point, highlights another feature that is central to my vision of political theology: its genealogical character. Simply put, political theology always takes the long view—indeed, to such an extent that other academic disciplines could rightly portray it as speculative and even irresponsible. In the case of the current study, for instance, I must confess that I am unable to empirically document the connection that I am positing between late medieval theology and contemporary neoliberal practices. But neither could anyone else, and that is because the types of large-scale narratives that political theology constructs are neither true nor false on a strictly empirical basis. Political theology seeks not to document the past, but to make it available as a tool to think with. It does not aim merely to interpret the present moment, but to defamiliarize it by exposing its contingency. In other words, political-theological genealogies are creative attempts to reorder our relationship with the past and present in order to reveal fresh possibilities for the future.
You can ask Adam Kotsko questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.
*
The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
