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‘No such thing as society’? Neoliberalism and the social
John Clarke
Introduction
Neoliberalism, in its many variants, has involved a sustained attack on ideas, institutions and formations of the ‘social’, including those of traditional social welfare systems and more recent movements towards social reform. This disposition is pungently described by Wendy Brown (2018: 16) as ‘the neoliberal attack on the social, which includes an attack on equality, social belonging and mutual social obligation, and also an attack on the replacement of traditional morality and traditional hierarchies (including racial hierarchies) by social justice and social reform’.
But does this mean that neoliberalism is simply ‘anti-social’? As Brown indicates, there are certainly arguments for treating it as such, not least the impacts on health, wellbeing and longevity that have followed in the train of neoliberalism’s inequality-generating policies and practices in many places. The turn to ‘austerity’ that was the dominant response to the global financial crisis intensified such consequences (see, for example, Stuckler and Basu, 2013). Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that the view of neoliberalism as ‘anti-social’ risks reifying a particular conception of the social and misses critical ways in which neoliberalism not merely contests but has sought to reconstruct older conceptions and institutions of the social. Instead, we might take a more conjunctural view of the processes of neoliberalization, highlighting three questions in particular:
•What conceptions of ‘the social’ has neoliberalism promoted (rather than attacked)?
•What has happened to older conceptions of ‘the social’ (expressed in social welfare and wider notions of public-ness)?
•What are the ‘emergent’ possibilities through which people lay claim to the idea and sensibility of ‘the social’?
The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of these questions.
In search of the social
Two orientations underpin the discussion. This chapter takes a view of the social that treats it as a shifting and contested field, composed of imaginings, representations and their institutionalizations rather than a fixed formation more or less associated with the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare states (Huber and Stephens, 2001).
Such conceptions of the social tend to locate it in a long history of struggles (in the Global North) to mitigate, redress and reform the effects of capitalism that began with the workers’ movements of the late 19th century and culminated in the social democratic accomplishments of the period following the Second World War. Some (like Esping-Anderson, 1985, 1990) celebrated these social democratic accomplishments; others, such as Jacques Donzelot (1984, 1988), traced the de-politicizing effects of this ‘invention of the social’. But both views seem to over-identify the social with those welfarist formations.
In more general terms, the social appears as the conceptual and political poor relation of political economy. In both conventional and critical variants, the domain of the social is secondary, grasped as a phenomenon whose character derives from the big political forces and their dynamics. In contrast, other conceptual and political interventions from the margins (from multiple margins, indeed) have made efforts to make the significance and the recurrent contestation of the social both visible and productive, most notably feminists and feminist scholarship (of many varieties). This more dynamic conception of the social has at least three critical aspects. First, it means treating the social as the site of the (complex) relations and practices of social reproduction. Second, it demands thinking of the social as continually traversed by governmental strategies that seek to embed the devices and desires that will deliver the correct ordering of the population and its capacities (as Foucault knew, government in this sense is always seeking to make better people). Third, the social remains a contingent and contested field, rather than a set of fixed relationships and positions.
The study of welfare states came rather late to the discovery that welfare was contested by politics other than those of class, centring on challenges to the ways in which welfare citizenship was constructed and constrained through categoric distinctions built around gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity, sexuality and disability (see, inter alia, Fiona Williams writing in Chapter 10; Lewis et al, 2000). In thinking about the social in these terms, we can draw on Catherine Hall’s comments in her study of metropole–colony relations across England and Jamaica, where she argues that the social is continuously engaged and reworked by projects and processes seeking to map, reorder and remake the social body:
Marking differences was a way of classifying, of categorising, of constructing boundaries for the body politic and the body social. Processes of differentiation, positioning men and women, colonisers and colonised, as if these divisions were natural, were constantly in the making, in conflicts of power … The mapping of difference, I suggest, the constant discursive work of creating, bringing into being, or reworking these hieratic categories, was always a matter of historical contingency. The map constantly shifted, the categories faltered, as different colonial sites came into the metropolitan focus, as conflicts of power produced new configurations in one place or another. (Hall, 2002:17, 20)
Although the temporal and spatial focus of this chapter is different, this view of a contingent and contested social provides a vital foundation for thinking about the shifting relationships between neoliberalism and the social.
The second condition for the