Thinking Historically About Neoliberalism: Nick Gane’s response to Will Davies, Theory, Culture and Society, May 28, 2014
In 1971, Michel Foucault wrote a short polemic, entitled ‘Monstrosities in Criticism’, that took issue with reviews of Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things that had been published by Jean-Marc Pelorson and George Steiner. Foucault opened this piece with the statement that ‘There is criticism to which one responds, other criticism to which one replies’ (1971:57). While Foucault does not expand on this distinction, my own reading of this statement is that there is informed and constructive criticism that merits an engaged response, and ‘bad’ criticism that ‘deforms’ the text in question and for this reason deserves nothing more than a dismissive reply. You do not have to be Foucault or Steiner to feel the effects of these different types of criticism, and given a choice one always wants to be on the receiving end of the former. I am thus grateful to Will Davies for his careful reading of my recent article on the history of neoliberalism. I have learned much from Davies’ own work on this subject, in particular his recent book in the TCS book series, The Limits of Neoliberalism, which addresses many important points that I do not touch upon in my TCS article, including the concepts of sovereignty that underpin neoliberal forms of market governance, and notions of property rights and law that were pioneered by figures such as such as Ronald Coase and Harold Demsetz. My TCS article on Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, however, had a different set of concerns: first, to consider the relation of neoliberal thought to 19th Century liberalism (i.e. what made it new or ‘neo-’); and second, to situate the emergence of neoliberal reason in the period between the two World Wars – two points of interest that do not feature in existing historical accounts by Mirowski and Plewhe, Peck, and Burgin.
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