The Anti-liberalism of Neoliberalism

• In Event: Itineraries of Liberalism in the Global South

Abstract

Neoliberalism has been the subject of extensive critique in recent years, most of which has come from radical-democratic or anti-capitalist perspectives. While these critiques are important, there are also good liberal reasons to resist the consolidations of power that neoliberalism generates, including both the consolidation of economic power and the concentration of political power it often engenders. As we are seeing today, the consolidation of economic power that neoliberalism generates has a tendency to feed back into politics and society in highly pernicious and illiberal ways, as corporate money erodes the mechanisms intended to make government accountable to the public interest and encourages corruption, violations of the rule of law, and authoritarian tendencies on the part of elected officials. At the same time, while key classical liberals such as Locke, Montesquieu, and JS Mill give us explicit liberal grounds for worrying about unchecked political and social power, liberal arguments for the limitation of economic power are less well developed. This paper draws on Locke, Montesquieu, and Mill to demonstrate the anti-liberal character of neoliberalism, and it argues for the importance of extending, via law, the classical liberal principle of limited power to constrain the scale and scope of economic power as a necessary feature of liberal government.

Author

• Sharon R. Krause, Brown University