Neoliberalism & Social Control

Arianna Marchetti looks at how the Continental philosophers Michel Foucault and Byung-Chul Han view free-market politics.

- Arianna Marchetti

‘Neoliberalism’ is a catch-all term that refers to the promotion of free-market capitalism, the supremacy of market value, and privatization. Its opponents say it results in the exploitation of labour and widening income inequality, among other things. However, a simple and clear-cut definition of neoliberalism does not exist since there is still much disagreement about its meaning. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), the Marxist thinker David Harvey defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” According to Harvey, neoliberalism strives to promote wealth accumulation and economic elites through a discourse of liberty. In neoliberal thinking, Hegel’s famous ‘master and slave’ dialectic becomes a little blurred, since individuals are not exploited downtrodden workers but entrepreneurs in control of their means of production. The worker is free to do as she wishes.

Foucault