OT: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

Put your hands up, faker, you are under arrest for interstate felony fraud. LMAO

So Wendy Brown gives additional references at this same juncture:

Paula England and Deirdre McClosky both in Martha Alberson Fineman and Terence Doughtery (eds.) "Feminism Confronts Homo Oeconomicus: Gender, Law, and Society (2005).

Also Annette Baier, Carol M. Rose, Julie Nelson.

And of McClosky, "Demoralization of Economics, pp. 28-29.

Hobbes well understood the fundamental noncoherence of families mad of wholly self-regarding humans, which is why he, unlike Thatcher and many modern economists, did not formulate families as a priori.

Brown also references in this area Dixon and Wilson, "A History of Homo Oeconomicus" and Albert O. Hirschman, "Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse, buletin of he American Academy of Arts and Sciences 37.8 1984 pp. 11-28.

I don't want to kid anyone here, Wendy Brown's book is quite challenging to read. But I feel it to be extremely important.

In the organization I am working to build, among many other things, the books in our libraries will be another type of glue which binds the group together.

SJG urbandictionary.com

Jeff Beck, awesome! youtube.com

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Trolls don't come any better than Dougster. I am honored, as I also am by:

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SJG

Deirdre McCloskey is a libertarian scholar who has been affiliated with the CATO Institute. You're correct, McCloskey is transgendered. I have read some of her/his work, from when she was still Donald McCloskey and later on as Deirdre.

Thank you BHO for that info about Deirdre McClosky, and also the warning about her libertarianism. Wendy Brown is certainly not promoting libertarianism in any form. And as it sounds, McClosky could not be advocating in anyway for libertarianism either. I'll pay attention though.

So to review, to start with what Brown is drawing on of McClosky's

Paula England and Deirdre McClosky both in Martha Alberson Fineman and Terence Doughtery (eds.) "Feminism Confronts Homo Oeconomicus: Gender, Law, and Society (2005).

and yes, this is readily available in libraries, and Fineman, does not seem to be in anyway promoting libertarianism, rather she is attacking it. Feminism confronts homo economicus : gender, law, and society / edited by Martha Albertson Fineman and Terence Dougherty.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus ix
Part I: Law and Economics and Neoclassical Economic Theory 1 (56)

1. Economic Rhetoric, Economic Individualism, and the Law and Economics School

Terence Dougherty 3 (17)

1. The Demoralization of Economics: Can We Recover from Bentham and Return to Smith?

Deirdre McCloskey 20 (12)

1. Separative and Soluble Selves: Dichotomous Thinking in Economics

Paula England 32 (25) Part II: Feminism Confronts Neoclassical Economic Theory and Law and Economics 57 (118)

1. Playing with Fire: Feminist Legal Theorists and the Tools of Economics

Neil H. Buchanan 61 (33)

1. Feminism and Eutrophic Methodologies

Douglas A. Kysar 94 (23)

1. Private Property, the Private Subject, and Women: Can Women Truly Be Owners of Capital?

Elizabeth Mayes 117 (14)

1. Nest Eggs and Stormy Weather: Law, Culture, and Black Women's Lack of Wealth

Regina Austin 131 (16)

1. Deconstructing the State-Market Divide: The Rhetoric of Regulation from Workers' Compensation to the World Trade Organization

Martha T. McCluskey 147 (28) Part III: The Costs of the Free Market: Theories of Collective Responsibility and the Withering Away of Public Goods 175 (118)

1. Cracking the Foundational Myths: Independence, Autonomy, and Self-Sufficiency

Martha Albertson Fineman 179 (14)

1. The Politics of Economics in Welfare Reform

Martha T. McCluskey 193 (32)

1. Deterring "Irresponsible" Reproduction through Welfare Reform

Linda C. McClain 225 (36)

1. Feminist Economics: Implications for Education

Myra H. Strober 261 (32) Part IV: Feminism, Economics, and Labor 293 (108)

1. The New Face of Employment Discrimination

Katherine V.W. Stone 297 (27)

1. Contingent Labor: Ideology in Practice

Risa L. Lieberwitz 324 (14)

1. Commodification and Women's Household Labor

Katharine B. Silbaugh 338 (35)

1. Is There Agency in Dependency? Expanding the Feminist Justifications for Restructuring Wage Work

Laura T. Kessler 373 (28) Part V: Economics and Intimacy: Gendered Economic Roles and the Regulation of Intimate Relationships 401 (100)

1. What Do Women Really Want? Economics, Justice, and the Market for Intimate Relationships

June Carbone 405 (18)

1. Can Families Be Efficient? A Feminist Appraisal

Ann Laquer Estin 423 (27)

1. Some Concerns about Applying Economics to Family Law

Margaret E. Brinig 450 (17)

1. The Business of Intimacy: Bridging the Private-Private Distinction

Martha M. Ertman 467 (34) Contributors 501 (2) Index

And yes, McCloskey talks about Adam Smith, but this is a much more completely understood Smith, and as an opposition to Jeremy Bentham.

Fineman's book is certainly not about Libertarianism.

en.wikipedia.org

Yes, their are connections which might suggest McCloskey to be a librertarian, this may have been true. But now she seems to be 100% critical of all its premises.

deirdremccloskey.com

Yes, I see there are more connections, so she has to be approached with care. But Brown draws upon her because Brown is against Libertarianism and McCloskey seems to be on the same page.

amazon.com

SJG urbandictionary.com

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I haven't seen anything from Deirdre McCloskey to indicate that she has changed her political views, whether on her webpage, her statements, or the books she's written. It's certainly possible for a libertarian to make a case against Jeremy Bentham. And although many libertarians are sympathetic to the ideas of neoliberalism, they are not one-and-the-same thing. Brown's book seems to draw from feminist economists and writers with otherwise varied political perspectives. Also, Deirdre McCloskey should not be confused with Martha McCloskey. (Not that you did this.) Their political views are very different.

Thanks, and I'm glad you are someone who is up on these people and their ideas. I know that pursuing this area of thought will be worthwhile.

SJG urbandictionary.com

nationalreview.com

deirdremccloskey.org

niskanencenter.org

youtube.com

Okay, I think it was in Gordon White that he talks about McCloskey and this idea of her's about industrialization, "The Great Enrichment".

And yes that does sound like a probable endorsement for the bourgeoisie and conservative economics. However, I suspect that her views are quite critical and hence different from neo-liberalism. And also, she is trying to resurrect Adam Smith, but as she sees it, more properly read, and different from Hobbes and Bentham.

Anyway, I can't say anymore until I have had the chance to read her stuff.

In the group I am building we will have awesome libraries where such materials are always right at your finger tips.

SJG

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You should note that the Niskanen Center is a libertarian think-tank that broke away from the CATO Institute. (Their sole area of disagreement is that CATO thinks that global warming is real and that the government should do nothing about it, while the Niskanen Center thinks that global warming is real and that the government should do something about it. Other than that, they are sympatico.) And of course National Review is the conservative publication founded by William F. Buckley. Based on her material appearing in these venues, I'm still not seeing much evidence that Deirdre McCloskey has changed her political views. After a cursory glance, the central thesis of the article in NR appears to be that ideas are more important than capital or natural resources. That sounds reasonable enough to me.

Glad we have someone here who is so up on such matters. I've got some reading to do. Thanks again for the info.

SJG

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown, 2015, pp 108 ff

"

As neoliberalism submits all spheres of life to economization, the effect is not simply to narrow the functions of state and citizen or to enlarge the sphere of economically defined freedom at the expense of the common investment in public life and public goods. Rather, it is to attenuate radically the the exercise of freedom in the social and political spheres. This is the central paradox, perhaps even the central ruse, of neoliberal governance: the neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom -- free markets, free countries, free men -- but tears up freedom's grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike. States are subordinated to the market, govern for the market, and gain or lose legitimacy according to the market's vicissitudes; states also are caught in the parting ways of capital's drive for accumulation and the imperative of national economic growth. Subjects,liberated for the pursuit of their own enhancement of human capital, emancipated from all concerns with and regulation by the social, the political, the common, or the collective, are inserted into the norms and imperatives of market conduct and integrated into the purposes of the firm, industry, region, nation, or postnational constellation to which their survival is tethered. In a ghostly repetition of the ironic "double freedom" that Marx designated as the prerequisite of feudal subjects becoming proletarianized at the dawn of capitalism (freedom from ownership of the means of production and freedom to sell their labor power), a new double freedom -- from the state and from all other values -- permits market-instrumental rationality to become the dominant rationality organizing and constraining the life of the neoliberal subject. "

SJG

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I'll continue to appraise Deirdre McCloskey's stuff, just because I want to understand the enemy, and I want to understand why some are citing her.

But she is just another Libertarian idiot, a Libertarian idiot with a sex change.

youtube.com

A good alternative to her, promoting 'Innovation', but without the neo-liberal connotations, is Buckminster Fuller, say in his Critical Path.

Innovation is loaded language. He talks about a "Design Science Revolution", doing more with less, letting everyone live even better than kings had.

SJG

More Deirdre McCloskey

Learning to defend against the enemy, more Deirdre McCloskey: youtube.com

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Most of the non-technical books I read are written by people I don't agree with and want to be able to better argue against.

SJG

Alrighty. The first video is pretty good. It neatly encapsulates McCloskey's ideas on human capital and globalization, both of which I totally agree with.

And yes, I am aware of what you think of libertarianism. It's not very helpful to refer to one's ideological opponents as "idiots." Regardless, what do you identify yourself as anyway? A Marxist? A progressive? And to what do you attribute the 10-fold increase in real global wealth and abundance since the start of the 19th century? Welfare programs? The general slow-motion collapse of the Ancien Regime throughout the western world has been apparent for over 200 years now, and it dovetails nicely with more individual freedom and more innovation. It's been happening in fits and starts and it's certainly not a perfect straight line, but it seems obvious enough to me that it is real.

Pretty foolish to say that "innovation" ( a loaded term ) accrues because of libertarianism.

And what about the Wendy Brown quote?

SJG

Whatever you want to call it, people are much more free today than they were 200, 150, 100, or even 50 years ago. The small cracks that the Magna Carta and the Enlightenment put in the rickety framework of the "old way of doing things" eventually led to the American Revolution, the end of absolute monarchy, civil rights, free markets, abundant food, advanced technology, and all the things we take for granted today. This led to more freedom which led to more innovation which led to still more freedom, in a virtuous cycle.

I wouldn't say that libertarianism specifically led to this (because there is simply no place on earth where libertarianism has ever been tried as a governing philosophy), but the general idea that people should be more free rather than less free, that government should be limited rather than limitless - that certainly seems to have contributed.

Wendy Brown's central thesis, that the government and the "community" have yielded ground to neoliberalism's laissez faire philosophy seems curious to me. She talks about how the sovereignty of the individual and of the state have simultaneously retreated, but I fail to see how this could even be possible. When states have more sovereignty, individuals have less, and vice versa.

Like most left-wing critiques of free markets, Brown's analysis is limited by her belief that we have somehow replaced government power with "corporate power," although she never names it as such in the quote you provided. She fails to recognize that corporations are nothing more than groups of people, and that corporate actors are just as accountable to government power and to the dictates of the community as everyone else. Other than that, she describes the effects of neoliberalism as though they are criticisms, but to my eyes, they sound like unintentional praise. It all sounds good to me.

There have been increases in freedom, from the Magna Carta forward. But economic rights also have to be considered. And then as neo-liberalism rises, using its cover known as Libertarianism, people become more subjectified, controlled. Its just that the controls don't use iron chains anymore. They are over identity, psychology, social legitimacy, and then in the end it's the policeman's 9mm.

Libertarianism is a reactionary and bogus movement. It is not about creating freedom, it is about taking away freedoms which already exist, while talking nonsense.

One of the facets of neo-liberalism is economization, of everything. From coast to coast now activists have to fight against the privatization of everything from schools, to libraries, to prisons. Noting is considered legitimate unless it resembles entrepreneurial business.

Most people in this country had pension security either in 100% safe pensions, or in social security. It should still be that way today. Reagan introduced 401k/IRA to undermine that. It worked.

And there never has been anything like a free market. The most free is just gun run. What the right here calls free market is a game set up with massive gov't controls. Almost always it is highly unfair.

It is not just replacing gov't power with corp power, it is rendering the individual illegitimate until they are 'responsiblized' and 'financialized'.

Brown is drawing on Foucault's lectures call "Birth of Biopolitics".

The concerns and means of corporation are very different from those of lowly individual.

Neo-Liberalism is just one huge ponzi scheme.

SJG

King Crimson 1982 youtube.com

^^^ This mega-faggit who started this thread downs BBC like a 200 lb catfish getting noodled out of an Alabama river.

Noodling BBC? How true, right SJG?