What is Neoliberalism?

0:00:07.2 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.2 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.0 Aaron Powell: Joining us today is Kevin Vallier. He’s Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, where he directs the program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law. And he recently published a new entry on neoliberalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which gives us a good excuse to have him back on the show to talk about this much-​maligned idea. Welcome back, Kevin.

0:00:31.8 Kevin Vallier: Great to be here.

0:00:33.7 Aaron Powell: A lot of conservatives don’t know what Marxism is, but they know they don’t like it; therefore, everything they don’t like must be Marxism. Is neoliberalism kind of the same thing for the left?

0:00:48.1 Kevin Vallier: Well, I think so, to some extent. At least it was for a few decades. Where neoliberalism was something like, “Things seem to be moving in a markety direction, and we don’t like it.” But we’re going to associate other things with it, like the World Trade Organization; that’s part of neoliberalism. Or like, the World Bank is part of… The IMF is part of neoliberalism. And then they started to add other stuff, like colonialism is part of neoliberalism. So everything that capitalism was said to do in the past, neoliberalism is said to do now. But there’s no consistent definition or use of the term over the last few decades. It had been used in various points more coherently before then, Phil Magnus has some good stuff on it. But yeah, over the last 30 years or so, I’d say, yeah, it’s primarily a term you’d use.

0:01:47.1 Trevor Burrus: I’m usually immediately suspicious about just adding a prefix to a word and saying you have a new concept. Academia loves to do that, and especially the kind of literary criticism crowd loves to do that. So is “neo” doing anything, any work? I mean, it’s a different word than liberalism, but is it doing anything, doing any work, rather than just the word liberalism?

0:02:08.3 Kevin Vallier: I think it does a couple of things. The first is that it signals in its way, even though it probably shouldn’t, strictly speaking, given its relation to the word liberalism, but it usually denotes a doctrine of political economy, whereas liberalism the word doesn’t really do that. You know, you can be a market liberal… But if you’re a neoliberal you’re for markets. So it adds content in that respect, even though it’s kind of weird that it doesn’t… Adding the word “neo” makes the term liberalism refer to a smaller range of positions than liberalism does.

0:02:47.3 Kevin Vallier: It also connects it… It’s a kind of form of liberalism that was newer in the 20th century than the forms that predominated in, say, the first three-​quarters of the 20th century. Even though it harkens back in some ways to classical liberalism, it’s sometimes the case that people who talk about neoliberalism don’t want to admit that people like Adam Smith were market liberals. And so neoliberalism is a way to make this look like a totally new and terrible thing.

0:03:19.1 Aaron Powell: Where does the term come from, then? Is it a term that a group of people got together and said, “We are neoliberals,” or… Because it often feels like it’s more a term that’s used by critics to label people neoliberals.

0:03:32.6 Kevin Vallier: I mean, that’s what it’s become. Like I said, Phil Magnus has done some work on the early origins of the term. And I think it was originally a term… A term of abuse in the ’30s. But I think there were some people that described themselves as neoliberals at the time. But my work is all focused on the discussions that have popped up over the last 30 or 40 years, because the word went out of currency for a long time, until people revived it like Foucault.

0:04:00.2 Trevor Burrus: So insofar as when you started writing this essay, are you inventing or clarifying a concept by identifying it, say, with the three figures, Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan? Or did you do an archaeology to figure out where the Venn diagrams of the way people have used this word overlap?

0:04:23.9 Kevin Vallier: So there are a couple of constraints. There was inevitably a bit of crafting, because you wanted the word not to have a pejorative meaning. So, you had to craft a little bit, because the standard use of the term was as a term of abuse. And also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an encyclopedia of philosophy, so you had to look at what neoliberal doctrines were, not what neoliberal global economic policy is, right? So I had to craft neoliberalism as a philosophical doctrine, which means I needed to look at what they said had had a philosophical character. And then the thought was, well, I’d better look at the people who are usually called neoliberals to see what their philosophical commitments are.

0:05:13.8 Kevin Vallier: So I focused on folks in the broad ambit of neoliberalism, and I tried to explain variations and similarities between their political philosophies. So it did involve some crafting, certainly. But I was starting off with uses of the term, where a lot of new scholarship over the last five years has used, the figures that these scholars have used to describe… Or ho describe as neoliberals. So, a bit of crafting, but the recent historical scholarship helped me not be entirely crafting. But it was inevitable that you’d have to do some crafting of the term.

0:05:56.6 Aaron Powell: Your article starts with an examination of, I guess, the ways that the term gets misused, or what you think are less helpful ways of thinking about it. And that seems like, for a term that is in most people’s mind, just a pejorative, and with a smaller group of people who claim it in opposition. Maybe that’s a good place for us to start, too. What are some of the ways that… If we toss around the term people are thinking of, but either aren’t helpful or aren’t accurate?

0:06:27.7 Kevin Vallier: Well, the most inadequate use of the term, well, there’s one I didn’t even cover because it was so dumb, but… Which is that neoliberalism is the late 20th century forces of capital reclaiming their power, which doesn’t even make… It’s just… By that Brief History of Neoliberalism book written by a geography professor, it was just, you know, a disastrous use. But most of the time, and you see this in that book, but in almost all the books on neoliberalism until fairly recently, that neoliberalism was a kind of ethos, it was like every… All that matters is profit, let’s get wealthy. And everything in the world is seen through the cash nexus of buying and selling. So Foucault’s analysis was often of Gary Becker, of which that’s more fair to say than almost anybody that you would describe as neoliberal.

0:07:27.5 Kevin Vallier: But people who used the term following Foucault just didn’t know what the differences are between market liberals. And so Becker’s tendency to look at things through a pretty narrow cost-​benefit lens, even though it’s useful, would miss a lot of subtlety. Sometimes people have, and mostly philosophers, have associated neoliberalism with utilitarianism, various uses of the term utilitarianism, by the way. So some people think that neoliberalism’s all about the cost-​benefit analysis, it’s all about weighing up the costs and benefits of various policies, and that’s all really what matters in judging whether it makes sense, so it’s a way of being a utilitarian, where utilitarianism is crudely understood not in line with the tradition as [0:08:13.4] ____.

0:08:17.6 Kevin Vallier: Sometimes people equate neoliberalism with libertarianism, where… It’s not like there’s a very sharp distinction between them. But mostly the issue is that neoliberalism as is generally used would not include include Murray Rothbard. You can’t just identify neoliberalism as the market should do everything, you know, because the vast majority of people that that term has been used to describe have not been anarchists. So Quinn Slobodian at one point after his very, really cool book Globalists tried to put Mises and Rothbard and Hopper under the term neoliberalism. I just pushed back against that with him, and he hasn’t really… [0:09:06.3] ____.

0:09:06.3 Kevin Vallier: I said, look, look, your definition of neoliberalism is that people are trying to build a certain kind of state capacity to create and sustain markets, so you can’t call someone a neoliberal if they’re an anarcho-​capitalist, like by your own definition. So some people try to stretch it, even scholars, but just it doesn’t really work, but it usually denotes people who are students of Hayek or students of Friedman, who are going around the world trying to build market institutions in societies with extensive states to get them on a more stable footing, right, like cutting spending, lowering taxes, privatizing nationalized industries, having more free trade, all that good stuff.

0:09:47.3 Kevin Vallier: But neoliberals aren’t anarchists, and that leads to the final confusion, which is that very few neoliberals think about neoliberalism as their ideal, so a lot of times they’re like anti-​ideal theory in the way that Hayek sometimes is. But, you know, Buchanan, I think, fits under neoliberalism, but what he thinks is the very best is anarchy. And Friedman wasn’t always clear, because I don’t think he wanted to go as far as the [0:10:20.4] ____, or at least to say so openly.

0:10:23.5 Trevor Burrus: On that point, this seems tied to one of the lines in your essay, which I think is interesting, we should understand neoliberalism as a doctrine about how politics in the economy should be organized, it is not a theory of justice or legitimacy. Does that make it different than someone like Nozick or Hayek?

0:10:41.5 Kevin Vallier: Yes, it makes it different from Nozick. So the neoliberals are not saying the reason we should have markets is because it’s required by justice, like they almost never say that. They do sometimes allude to certain things being requirements of justice, but in general, no, that’s not their stress. And they’re also not giving a theory of when the state has authority. It’s not a theory of when one ought to obey the state, that’s not it either. It’s basically what its political and economic policies and some of the structure of its constitutions ought to take, what structure ought they to take.

0:11:24.5 Kevin Vallier: Now. It’s hard to distinguish between all these things, because the neoliberals themselves didn’t distinguish between all of these things, because they weren’t using the categories that analytic philosophers use. But if you apply the categories analytic philosophers use, I think that’s what you have to say, because the standard way of doing political philosophy these days, and for the last several decades, is that you divine conception of the theory of justice and then you try to reject the other theories of justice and then you say, okay, well, what institutions are implied by this conception of justice? And I think there’s some use in that enterprise, but I just don’t think that’s how neoliberals were thinking about what they should be doing, what they were trying to do.

0:12:12.3 Aaron Powell: Does this mean then that it’s somewhat of a category mistake to think of neoliberalism from a philosophical perspective, and instead just to say like because there are certainly like… I know people who call themselves neoliberals, our friend Sam Bowman, who will tell you that he invented neoliberalism, is also a utilitarian. But there are also people who are neoliberals who are not, and so to think of it that way versus just neoliberalism is a term for like a family of policy preferences and views about how a government, like what institutions we should have, but there isn’t… There isn’t a philosophy there at all.

0:12:51.5 Kevin Vallier: Well, I think that it is often used in that way, but then it… Whenever people use it that way they end up appealing to like they believe in this kind of liberty, or they believe value works like this, or they believe what we ought to do is that. And so when you zoom in a bit into what they’re talking about there are philosophical claims, ethical claims about value, about the nature of liberty, so I do think there’s a philosophical dimension to neoliberalism. And so what I’m doing in the piece is defining it as a philosophy, but I’m not ruling out that the term can be used to refer… And you say, well, neoliberal philosophy is this, right, but it could be like neoliberal ideology is this other thing, they’d better be related, philosophy and ideology, but… You know.

0:13:47.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, they probably should be. So if we’re going to get into the kind of big shared concepts, as we pointed out, you focus on Hayek, Friedman and James Buchanan, who are usually put into the libertarian camp, but we kind of discussed that’s not super important. Now, of course people like Rothbard deny that Hayek was a libertarian, so… But what would you say… So first of all, why, if they’re not Nozick or something, why do they believe in freedom, do they all like have a same version, like generally speaking, freedom is best, but why do they think this?

0:14:23.6 Kevin Vallier: Well, for Hayek, right, it’s all about discovery. I mean, he says, if we knew what the result of liberty would be, he says there would be no case for it, which I’ve always like, no, that’s not true. But Hayek’s… You know, I always tell people that like Hayek’s a social epistemologist, like first and foremost. He’s trying to figure out, socially speaking, what we can know, what we can’t know. And almost everything he says is through the lens of an epistemologist, what do we not know, what can we discover, how can we figure out things together?

0:15:01.1 Kevin Vallier: So that’s one reason he likes freedom, but he also likes freedom because… And Friedman says this too, it’s like we have freedom because we don’t know what morality requires. And sometimes it’s not clear, sometimes it looks like they think, well, there is no objective thing morality requires, like for Hayek, you know, we have all these moral beliefs because that’s how we evolve. But sometimes it sounds like from Hayek, especially Friedman, like that there is a moral reality, we just don’t know very much about it, and so we shouldn’t legislate it because we just don’t know that much about it, and people ought to be able to be free to try different forms of life to maybe figure out what it is. I think Friedman was just not very interested in philosophy, and so he’s the one that’s hardest to tease anything out of, so a lot of what he says strikes me as the most confusing.

0:15:57.4 Trevor Burrus: So, to clarify, would this be the difference of being like saying the drug war is wrong, or governments can’t prohibit what you put in your body because it’s not something that governments are allowed to do based on morality. That’s not an argument they would use, they would say something like, maybe drugs are a good way of living life and finding happiness, and because we don’t know, we should let them be legal, is that kind of how they would approach it?

0:16:25.2 Kevin Vallier: That’s one kind of thing, but Buchanan’s a little different because… Well, Buchanan’s so expressly a contractarian, and his contractarianism comes before everything else, even his libertarianism, he’s a contractarian first. So part of freedom is that we agree to the terms of social life, and that’s the only way they can have any justification. That’s the only way they can have any authority for us is that we agree to them. So one reason that we should have this or that policy is it’s allowed by a set of constitutional rules to which we would or could agree. And that’s also, I think, why he thinks it by and large preserves freedom.

0:17:11.5 Kevin Vallier: Buchanan periodically throws some shade on Hayek for stressing evolution too much, so he’s not as focused on discovery in that sense. But obviously, he’s extremely influenced by Frank Knight, to a crazy degree, and obviously Frank Knight was always talking about things we couldn’t know, and when we could assign a probability to an outcome and when we couldn’t assign a probability to an outcome and how to explain entrepreneurship and all of that stuff. So I just see, and this is something people very frequently miss, and one reason I wanted to do the article, is that just a lot of neoliberal claims are based on what we don’t know and how to organize things so that we can know more than we did before.

0:17:55.6 Kevin Vallier: But Buchanan’s a little different. Now, the weird thing is, is that in Mirage of Social Justice, you know, Law, Legislation and Liberty Volume Two, Hayek says, does say that he kinda likes what Rawls is doing, although he did admit later, he didn’t read A Theory of Justice, just some of Rawls’ less status earlier papers. But he does say that there is a kind of contractarian formula that if used very modestly can be used to do some eminent criticism of the social order. You sort of ask, well, we can evaluate this local state of affairs by whether it measures up to rules that we could agree to if we didn’t know our situation or circumstances, he actually says that, but he never makes very much of this contractarian commitment.

0:18:44.5 Kevin Vallier: And a lot of people don’t even know it’s in Mirage at all because it’s so understated. You know, if you’re a philosopher, you can see it, it’ll come up, but it doesn’t even register for most people.

0:18:56.1 Trevor Burrus: There’s also a footnote in there… I don’t know if you’re familiar…

0:18:58.9 Kevin Vallier: About Rawls?

0:19:00.6 Trevor Burrus: Well, there’s a footnote where Hayek says that he is asked, this was during the bombing of London, when he was in London, he had young kids, he was asked, “Where would you send your kids? What country would you want to send to your kids to, if you wanted to get your kids out of blitzed London?” And he didn’t know, he says, I’m paraphrasing, “Not knowing my kids’ capabilities, they’re too young for me to know what they’re really good at and what they’re not good at, I would send them to the United States.” Especially, he also says, because they’re not black. But it’s a weird original position he kind of puts himself in vis-​a-​vis his kids. “I don’t know my kids’ capability, so I want to send them to the country that would maximize their capabilities if I didn’t know their capabilities.”

0:19:51.0 Kevin Vallier: Yeah, and it’s funny, because Buchanan has a version of this too, that he calls his veil of uncertainty. Now, this one isn’t about coming up with a theory of justice, but it is like, well, how do we choose constitutional rules? The cool thing is that almost nobody knows how well they’re going to fare under constitutional rules, so they can’t actually rationally choose constitutional rules that would be biased towards them. Now, of course, Buchanan was just wrong about that. Like if you’re a Roman Catholic integralist, like, you know you want the Catholic Church to be a part of the constitution as is the established church.

0:20:25.5 Kevin Vallier: But in general, Buchanan was thinking, well, it’s good that pure constitutional choice has built into it that it’s extremely hard, if not impossible, to predict how you would fare under it, and so that’s going to ensure that your choice is a more rational and fair one than otherwise. Because Buchanan always really liked Rawls and tried to correspond with him early on, but Rawls eventually lost interest because he became convinced that they weren’t doing the same thing, like that Buchanan was doing constitutional design and Rawls was doing the theory of justice in order to do the theory of constitutional design. Whereas my view is he should have kept reading Buchanan and Tullock so that he would have done constitutional design better, because he didn’t do it very well.

0:21:12.3 Kevin Vallier: Like for instance, not adopting the full compliance assumption, which of course Buchanan… Obviously it was like his thing to reject it. [chuckle] Government officials and people would comply with whatever laws were made. So yeah, it just kind of… They do periodically want to appeal to some notion of an impartial or fair choice, and that it would be better to have a constitutional order that’s in somehow fair. Hayek talks about this a lot with equality before the law, and just how important equality before the law is, and how bad it is to try to have a substantive egalitarian principle that determines what people’s share should be, because if you try to work those out, it’s going to lead in an authoritarian direction, for all the reasons we’re familiar with.

0:22:05.5 Kevin Vallier: So there are inklings of political philosophical principles. And more than inklings in some cases. So it wasn’t a stretch to bring out… It wasn’t too much of a stretch to bring out their philosophical views. I didn’t go into all their philosophical views, because Buchanan is like… He just has some weird stuff to say that I think is pretty interesting in some respects, but is pretty odd in others. But, so I didn’t go into all of their philosophical views, just the ones that were relevant to their political philosophy.

0:22:46.7 Aaron Powell: Well, on the political philosophy, then, I wanted to ask about the relationship between neoliberalism and democracy, and do it by picking up on something that you said a while back in our conversation, where you dismissed the one definition of neoliberalism as capital reasserting itself. That seems to me to be one of the main criticisms or characterizations that people who use neoliberalism as a pejorative, and when they point to stuff, like Margaret Thatcher’s reform efforts in the UK as an example of neoliberalism or other efforts to undo state socialism. And it does seem like there is… Neoliberalism is a fan of markets, but it’s not… Typically, it’s not a fan of markets in the way that, say, like a left-​market anarchist would be, in that neoliberalism seems to have a, if not a soft spot, like at least a… Much support for big business as a important economic institution and driver of growth, and they defend large corporations quite often.

0:24:06.6 Aaron Powell: And so it does seem like you could get the sense, if you were someone on the left who is opposed to markets in that way, in kind of the grand capitalist way, that in fact it is… It’s an apology for big business and the status quo of multinational corporations, and that it’s therefore, it seems, has an anti-​democratic bent, in that it’s… If the democratic populace wants to regulate or wants its democratic socialism, neoliberalism is going to push back against that in favor of business. So I don’t… I think they’re wrong, obviously, the left is wrong in their critiques of the market and a lot of their critiques of business and so on, but it doesn’t seem like an incoherent objection from at least if you’re sitting in that perspective.

0:25:04.0 Kevin Vallier: One thing that Friedman talks a lot about, and Hayek and Buchanan, is freedom of entry into markets. And what they’re really concerned with, I think, is they want to decentralize power, they really like it. Friedman really, really likes it. But they think the best way to do it is with exit mechanisms, where you can have competition, or entry mechanisms, where anyone can enter a market and provide a service, anyone can choose not to buy products in that market, and they think that’s going to produce the kind of decentralization of power that many on the left want. But what you see on the left is the best way to get control over power is through voice, right? It’s through democracy.

0:25:49.6 Kevin Vallier: So I think both wings of liberalism are interested in liberty and interested in the limitation of power and arbitrary power, but they think there are different institutions, so libertarians and neoliberals tend to stress that power is controlled when government’s limited and there’s competitive markets, competitive, modular, whatever Friedman and Hayek’s differences are. And on the left, they say we need more democracy, we’ve got to democratize stuff to make it free and limit its power. So I think what the neoliberal will say is, well, look, if corporations arise on a relatively free market, then that’s an indication that they’re doing some good, but oftentimes corporations arise when there’s not freedom of entry and exit from markets, and then they might get too big, so I think that’s the view.

0:26:48.3 Trevor Burrus: And in terms of another critique that you give of neoliberalism, and this is just also capitalism in general, is this critique that, those… The adherents are, they believe that this system structures society correctly because it puts the better people on top, or the people who at least serve the capitalist purposes better than other people, and therefore the resulting ordering of society in a free market sense has some sort of justice to it. How would that resonate with… The neoliberal philosophy as you’re explaining it in Hayek and Friedman and Buchanan in particular?

0:27:30.7 Kevin Vallier: They’ll say things about justice here and there, but I think if you really pushed them, they would say something like, well, the reason we want these institutions is because they’re generally the best. And then they would be kind of cagey on what the best was, because they want to be subjectivists about it, and you say, well, it just kinda depends on what people’s values are, maybe they care about justice, maybe they care about the good. But they do seem clearly to have certain intuitions about justice, like the coercion is a great source of injustice, that treating people unequally before the law for Hayek, that’s a very grave injustice. He identifies more with the anti-​aristocratic elements of liberal tradition, at least explicitly. Whereas I think Buchanan was actually personally the most hostile to aristocracy. He hated the Kennedys passionately.

0:28:30.6 Kevin Vallier: And yeah, so there is a kind of anti-​elitism. Although Friedman spent a lot of time on elites, but I don’t think he ever was subservient to them. That’s what was kind of cool about the guy is he would just say, well, don’t do this or do that, or tell whatever military general that was that having a draft is slavery. So I think in general, there is a kind of hostility to certain basic kinds of unfairness, like aristocratic privilege, like excess coercion. Hayek talks about treating people as tools, they don’t… So like I said, it… The view doesn’t, they’re not, they’re not trying to proceed in the manner that late 20th century political philosophers proceed. Late 20th century political philosophers proceed from, what is justice? That’s the first question. What is justice?

0:29:44.0 Kevin Vallier: And for the neoliberals, that was just not the first question, so justice comes up, but it’s not the main topic of conversation, whereas for Nozick that is the question, right, it’s like, what is justice? So for Rawls, well, what is justice? That’s the question. Buchanan… I mean, it’s funny, because I think he thought that contractarianism described in some way what was just, but he doesn’t talk about justice very much, even though he knows that Rawls did, I think he’s more interested in cooperation and all the reasons that cooperation is a good thing.

0:30:19.9 Aaron Powell: What is the relationship between neoliberalism and the welfare state? Because that seems to be one area where say they differ a lot from libertarians in that they see not just… My sense is the argument is not just that the welfare state is something we ought to have in order to prevent people from living in poverty, or it’s like to help the people at the bottom, but that it is… A lot of them make an argument that the welfare state is a piece of a well-​functioning capitalist economy that you need, you need a welfare state or a basic income or something like that in order to enable the institutions of a free economy to continue politically or to thrive and so on. So is that… Does neoliberalism require a robust welfare state?

0:31:11.4 Kevin Vallier: I mean, it depends, there’s… For everybody, there’s either a welfare state or the weird thing for Buchanan, which I found, weird, weird thing, is his almost total silence on basic welfare programs. Although he was a supporter of 100% inheritance tax, and I presume he thought that the money should go to some kinds of government programs or something. But for Friedman, it looks like it’s just, look, some people get really poor and they can’t take care of themselves or they’re invalids or whatever, and we should just make sure we take care of them, and that can be done through like a negative income tax.

0:31:54.9 Kevin Vallier: But Hayek’s position is subtler. I do think he thinks that there is a kind of injustice in pure laissez-​faire. I know, again, doesn’t start from justice, but I think he thinks that that’s a problem, but he also thinks that I think markets are going to work better when you take certain dumb risks, big giant dumb risks out of life, like not saving it all for your retirement, or getting really, really sick. Now, he prefers that markets provide these things and that government subsidize them. So generally, like he said he was a fan of Friedman’s proposal for vouchers. He really, really liked the idea.

0:32:35.9 Kevin Vallier: So in general, he wants, say, markets to provide unemployment insurance for state subsidies, so the kind of welfare state that he’s for is just more minimal than in terms of what government produces, but I think he thinks it plays a variety of important roles, not just reducing poverty, but I think he also thinks it helps people to be at peace with the system. And I think there’s something to that. The main reason I’m not a libertarian [0:33:05.1] ____ non-​ideal theory is that I think we evolved to be extremely risk-​averse, and I think people are just going to demand, overwhelming majority of people are just going to demand the welfare state, and so it’s just really… It’s not feasible to get rid of it. The best thing to do is just to convince people like they’ll be more secure and have more money if markets provide the services and government subsidize them.

0:33:30.7 Kevin Vallier: That’s a hard enough sell as it is. I still would like to do without it, but I just think there are certain features of human psychology that make it, not inevitable, but in a democracy, virtually inevitable, because people are just going to say, yeah, I don’t want people, others to have to suffer from just these dumb risks. How did Obama sell ObamaCare, right? You shouldn’t go broke just because you got sick. That’s the thought that I think drives a lot of the expansion to the welfare state, but neoliberals, I think, kind of accept it as a reality. I think Hayek thinks it has some positive functions in general. I think that it also helps people avoid it with his concern with arbitrary interference, not just interference, but…

0:34:24.8 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting that… Another term that I’ve heard a lot, I really hope that your project to actually have neoliberalism have substance rather than just epithet, but another one that I hear a lot to describe people like Hayek, Friedman and James Buchanan is market fundamentalist. And Hayek’s… The idea, particularly Hayek, that Hayek is just dogmatically adheres to the market, market will solve all things, but actually, if we’re just talking about welfare programs, the amount of welfare programs that he believed in was quite large and Rothbard, that was one of his big problems with the constitution of liberty. I know that recently, Aaron and I both participated in, a couple of years ago, in a manuscript review for a book coming out by Andrew Koppelman.

0:35:17.3 Kevin Vallier: Yes.

0:35:18.2 Trevor Burrus: That is called The Corruption of Libertarianism. I think the working title… Eventually be called that…

0:35:23.1 Kevin Vallier: Andy’s a good friend.

0:35:24.5 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, it was Andy’s attempts…

0:35:25.3 Kevin Vallier: I helped him with that book a lot, it was originally Hayek versus Rand, he didn’t even know who Rothbard was.

0:35:31.8 Trevor Burrus: Well, exactly. That was what he told us, he said that he probably thought that Hayek was some sort of market fundamentalist, and then he went and actually read him, because he wanted to take down libertarianism and he… And part of his book is to say the left should read Hayek, like he’s not…

0:35:47.9 Kevin Vallier: He got convinced by some of what Hayek said. I said, would you describe yourself as a left Hayekian? He said, that’s fine with me.

0:35:54.1 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, so that interesting thing. So neoliberals, and this is where you can bring in libertarians critiquing neoliberals for being too squishy on all of these things, critiquing Hayek for being too squishy, Friedman for being too squishy. But are they squishy in different ways?

0:36:11.1 Kevin Vallier: Yeah, yeah. And to different degrees. So it is… I think Friedman was the most willing to go for the market, even… But the thing about Friedman was that he was just so… He was just so deeply focused on actually getting people to change… The public and the politicians to change their minds, he thought he could do it, and he did do it, because he was amazing at it. There are a few people ever that are more persuasive than him, you listen to him talk on video or whatever. He was a truly grand communicator. His writing was fabulous, but in person, he was really extraordinary.

0:37:00.0 Kevin Vallier: But there are times where he could get… He could sound pretty hardcore, but he was really focused on trying to move people at the margin. Hayek I think ultimately, deep down, became so into ignorance, or ignorance and complexity theory and all of this stuff, that libertarianism was basically a kind of excessively ideal theory, and so he didn’t go in that direction, I think, because he just thought it was never going to happen. Buchanan, it’s hard to know, because he does have these lines about anarchy being best, but that the sort of constitutional order he advocates is like the second best, but it’s hard to know exactly what all the productive states should be doing.

0:38:00.2 Kevin Vallier: You do get something of a sense from him. So it’s hard to tell how libertarian he is and what he thinks we can realistically push for. I think Friedman was the most optimistic about what we could realistically push for. Hayek, the least, though he wouldn’t call it optimism. I think he was enough of an ideal theorist that he just thought the project of ideal theory was popular. Now, this is belied by the fact that he will frequently say like, oh, we need an ideal to compete with the socialists, we need something that inspires us or whatever, but I think his aspiration for an ideal theory became the attempt to get people excited about non-​ideal theory.

0:38:45.4 Kevin Vallier: Like we know so little, let’s construct institutions so that we can learn. So I don’t think Hayek was actually entirely coherent on this, but this is, again, me looking at it as a guy who’s done work on ideal and non-​ideal theories, so I may be demanding too much precision, but I still do think there’s a tension in Hayek on what we should hope for, what we should aim at.

0:39:11.5 Aaron Powell: So we’ve talked a lot about the left’s critiques of neoliberalism, and we’ve hit on some of the libertarian critiques, which that is… Largely that it allows the state too much of a role, but we’ve seen, especially over the last five, six years, a emergence of a right-​wing nationalist populist critique of what we’ll call kind of the, what might be labeled the broad neoliberal order or something that, and coming from a direction of, I think, not just that free trade ships jobs overseas, which has been a common rural conservative sort of critique, but also in this, that the more that we are multinational, the more that we are seeing ourselves as economic agents, the more that we identify with the economic order as opposed to the political order, which are all things that neoliberalism would seem to push for, the less we have this connection to family, faith and soil, I suppose. And is that… Is that new? Is there something… Is it a reaction to this kind of rise of neoliberalism, like what’s going on there?

0:40:36.5 Kevin Vallier: Well, I’ve thought a lot about this, because my next book’s on anti-​liberalisms, and I’m focusing on the kind of intellectual vanguard of the Trumpists, which they turn out to be almost, not the politicians, I mean intellectuals, they tend to be Catholic. Because Catholicism… And Protestantism’s either classically liberal or progressively liberal, in the United States. There are some exceptions, important exceptions, post-​liberal Protestants. But, I mean, Catholics have never been as much of a fan of the market as Protestants, and so a lot of these folks are basically saying, look, the problem with neoliberalism is it’s like anti-​liberalism, and then they have like these… They call us right liberals, and then they call the left, left liberals because they want everything they don’t like to be liberal.

0:41:35.1 Kevin Vallier: And then the conservatives are all right liberals. So like [0:41:38.9] ____ to me on Twitter was, I said like, libertarians don’t really address integralists very much. He was like, “Well, there’s all these articles in National Review,” like in his mind, it’s all jumbled, it’s like all one big bad. And so for a lot of these folks, it’s like, yeah, trade has decimated the manufacturing base, but that’s not the point. The point is to destroy any liberal distinctives, right? It’s not just, oh, we want to restrict trade or we want to restrict immigration. They do want to do those things, Adrian Vermeule wants there to be privilege for Catholics, because the more Catholics you get in the US, the more you’ll be able to establish a Catholic regime in the US.

0:42:27.5 Kevin Vallier: It’s their… They’re continental conservatives, deeply hostile to democracy, deeply hostile to anything that looks like the celebration of liberty, in part because continental liberals were a lot more vicious to religion, whereas Anglosphere liberals tend not to be. So it’s Maistre and Carl Schmitt and this kind of thing. So it’s like every criticism of liberalism that has been made, with the exception of some left-​wing criticisms they hold, but they want to… Vermeule’s talked about searing it where it originated, just like burning it. They use a lot of violent language. So the critique of neoliberalism is that it’s like the kind of autonomy-​loving, hippie left, but just in the economic sphere, and it has the same… It’s the same kind of acidic individualism. It’s all really one big thing, which I find immensely irritating, because it’s just so sloppy to try to make all of your enemies the same enemy, like conservatives do with Marxists.

0:43:44.5 Trevor Burrus: So is that the point, kind of, and one reason why you wanted to write this piece and get it out there, because from Aaron’s standpoint, this has been commented on a lot on this show, a lot throughout the kind of places that we read, liberalism seems to be embattled from both sides, something I kind of didn’t think would happen in my lifetime, but I should be more of a student of human history that these things are kind of like cyclical. So in that sense, is this just… Maybe we should just say, we are all neoliberals, if that’s the word you’re going to use, we can all stand together with all these people that both Adrian Vermeule and people on the liberal left are critiquing is basically the same. That we can say, okay, yeah, right, we’ll stand with people who are liberal, who maybe their policies are a little bit more left-​wing, traditionally speaking, or their policies are a little bit more right-​wing, but at least they’re liberals. Is that kind of where you think you’re coming from with this?

0:44:45.4 Kevin Vallier: I think that that’s happening, and I think that it is kind of where… Nowhere near as bad as liberals were, the neoliberals and the order liberals were when the Mont Pelerin society was founded, because you had social conservatives like Röpke in there, and so you had some religion folks, but then you had Frank Knight who went ape, ape, ape when Hayek suggested calling it the Acton-​Tocqueville society, because they were Catholics, which is one reason they called it the Mont Pelerin society. So you had a wide range of opinion, but they were committed to a basic economic liberalism, private property and democracy, and then they upheld freedoms like speech and religion.

0:45:32.2 Kevin Vallier: And I think that we are moving in that direction. My analysis of this is based on a tripartite ideology distinction between socialism, liberalism and conservatism, and I see the left as a kind of liberalism-​socialism hybrid, and I see the right, the old right or the non, the liberal right as being a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism, which is what we had from the ’50s with Buckley, all three down to the 2000s. And now what we’re getting is a left that’s more and more just like the socialist tradition, not that they want to take over the means of production, but the kind of obsession with progress, the willingness to appeal to concepts like [0:46:18.2] ____ consciousness to do away with… To do away with toleration as a principle, the idea that that’s like bourgeois, or privilege as it’s now called.

0:46:28.4 Kevin Vallier: So I don’t think these folks are Marxists by any means, but I do think there is a kind of shedding of liberalism to just more embrace kind of a socialist orientation to the world. And then on the right, what we’re seeing is there’s the sort of embattled but still dominant sort of liberalism-​conservativism hybrid, and then there is the new conservatism, which is really like a conservatism-​socialism hybrid, it’s quasi-​fascist in my opinion, and sometimes just fascist. So they want to use the… I mean, fascism is essentially using the state to preserve certain kinds of national ideas and traditions and stuff like that, it’s like the reasons Catholics all got behind Franco in France, is they thought that Franco would destroy the socialists and the liberals, and then they’d be able to restore Catholic rule.

0:47:25.5 Kevin Vallier: So essentially what you’re seeing is the socialist and conservative ideas and frameworks and mindsets being decoupled from liberalism, and so the true liberals, the people who were liberals first, they’re getting pushed into a corner. And this is the kind of thing Hayek and Schumpeter predicted, they just thought this was going to happen. We often forget that a lot of classical liberals have been pretty worried that the liberal order is not sustainable, and that it will sow the seeds of its own destruction, which is one of the things that these Catholic integralists often say, although it’s bizarrely apocalyptic and ungrounded in their case.

0:48:11.8 Kevin Vallier: So I think, yeah, what’s going on is that we could say, look, we’re neoliberals or libertarians, if you want to be picky, and we are with the left liberals if you’re for a big welfare state right now, that’s just not the main thing that matters. Like the main thing that matters is preserving the basic liberties, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, opposing certain kind of social norms that restrict what we can say and speak, say and do, trying to sort of treat people equally before the law and not to give up on all of that as bourgeois, like not… Having some sense that… This is another big stress of mine is that I think for liberalism, it’s been the most opposed to class theory or any kind of theory of that social life is inherently conflictual, that’s always been part of the liberal tradition, like harmony of interests, do you know what I mean?

0:49:07.8 Kevin Vallier: And the key to socialism is like the disharmony of interests, and continental conservatism is similar, like with Schmitt saying that all politics is war, for instance, although Foucault said the same thing, so. The liberals are the ones saying we can all get along, and some believe in a big welfare state, and some people believe in a small welfare state, but the people saying we can all get along, we can all live together, we don’t have to fight to the death, but the thing that… The thing the progressive left and the illiberal right, the illiberal left and illiberal right, they want to fight, like they don’t hate each other as much as they hate us. They like that there’s just an enemy, right, and particularly the illiberal right, they’re just like, look… They’re excited about this, this is what [0:49:57.0] ____ says, there’s no peace in the culture war, the only way he says is through.

0:50:02.7 Kevin Vallier: And I always want to ask: Through who? Because there is an answer to that question that’s pretty ugly. So I think there’s like… One of the things that’s going on is because in following trust in greater polarization, people just want to tear each other to pieces, and liberalism becomes under threat when people want to hurt each other, and liberalism does the best when people are… Don’t see much reason to fight. And so what we have to do is creatively make the case that we can all get along. And so I think that’s the most important thing right now, is just pointing to the desirability and the possibility of tolerance, and it being… Because that’s what we’re losing, is that people on the left and right are just like, look, I’m correct and the others are incorrect, and I’m going to smash them. It’s the force that gives them meaning, right… I mean, the old Chris Hedges thing, I think he said it was war is a force that gives us meaning. So politics as war is the force that gives them meaning.

0:51:10.4 Kevin Vallier: It’s also a consequence of secularization in my view, where the war mentality is common to a lot of religious people, but it can be directed towards yourself, like that you’re battling your own passions, or you’re fighting your own desires, do you know what I mean? Whereas I think for many… There are many secular people that draw on religious traditions, obviously Aaron does, but Buddhism and Christianity are actually pretty similar in that respect, in the sense that that… The big fight. The big fight is not to dominate some other group, do you know what I mean? So I think a lot of these folks on the right, they passively, without realizing they’re implicitly secularized, and so they just see politics is all that matters.

0:52:11.9 Kevin Vallier: So you’ve got these people who say they’re Evangelical Christians, but all they do is watch Fox News, they go to church like one a year or something, at Easter. That’s all they really care about, is to be in [0:52:21.5] ____. So yeah, that’s my kind of take on this, is that we need a kind of liberal coalition, and that is self-​conscious and that is ready to say to both sides, as much as they don’t want to hear it, that we don’t have to do this. There is another way.

0:52:53.9 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thought, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.