Author-Meets-Critics: Benjamin L. McKean, "Disorienting Neoliberalism"

Session Submission Type: Virtual Author meet critics

Session Description

How can the aspiration for global justice be realized in a world characterized not only by pluralism and difference but by hegemonic neoliberalism? Does neoliberalism as a political force have an elective affinity with pluralism, as suggested by its rhetorical celebration of diversity in the boardroom and executive suite? Or is it a homogenizing force, as suggested by the worry that corporate globalization is eroding national differences? Should we understand the struggles against economic inequality and white supremacy as intertwined, as neoliberalism optimizes and thereby reinforces whatever hierarchies it finds?

This panel will address these questions by bringing together junior and senior scholars to respond to Benjamin L. McKean’s 2020 Oxford University Press book _Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom_. In the world neoliberalism has made, the pervasiveness of injustice and the scale of inequality can be so overwhelming that meaningful resistance seems impossible. _Disorienting Neoliberalism_ argues that combatting the injustices of today's global economy begins with reorienting our way of seeing so that we can act more effectively. Within political theory, standard approaches to global justice envision ideal institutions, but provide little guidance for people responding to today's most urgent problems. Meanwhile, empirical and historical research explains how neoliberalism achieved political and intellectual hegemony, but not how we can imagine its replacement.

_Disorienting Neoliberalism_ argues that people can and should become disposed to solidarity with each other once they see global injustices as a limit on their own freedom. The book reorients us by taking us inside the global supply chains that assemble clothes, electronics, and other goods, revealing the tension between neoliberal theories of freedom and the hierarchical, coercive reality of their operations. In this new approach to global justice, McKean explains how neoliberal institutions and ideas constrain the freedom of people throughout the supply chain from worker to consumer. Rather than a linked set of private market exchanges, supply chains are political entities that seek to govern the rest of us. Where neoliberal institutions train us to see each other as competitors, McKean provides a new orientation to the global economy in which we can see each other as partners in resisting a shared obstacle to freedom — and thus be called to collective action.

Drawing from a wide range of thinkers, from Hegel and John Rawls to W. E. B. Du Bois and Iris Marion Young, _Disorienting Neoliberalism_ shows how political action today can be meaningful and promote justice, moving beyond the pity and resentment global inequality often provokes to a new politics of solidarity. This solidarity among diverse and pluralistic peoples is a desirable and feasible alternative to the reactionary populist backlash that purports to resist neoliberalism.

Author: Benjamin L. McKean is Associate Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University

Panelists:
Paul Apostolidis, Associate Professorial Lecturer and Deputy Head of Department for Education, Department of Government, London School of Economics; author of The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity (Oxford University Press 2019), Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Duke University Press, 2000)

Erin Pineda, Assistant Professor of Government, Smith College; author, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press 2021)

Joseph Winters, Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies, Duke University; author of Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press, 2016)

Emma Mackinnon, University Lecturer in the History of Modern Political Thought and Fellow, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge

Chair: Elisabeth Ellis, Professor of Philosophy and director, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Programme, University of Otago; author of Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (2005) and Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context (2008)

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Elisabeth H. Ellis University of Otago

Presenters

• Benjamin McKean Ohio State University

• Paul C. Apostolidis London School of Economics

• Erin Pineda Smith College

• Emma Stone Mackinnon Cambridge University

• Joseph Winters