Confronting the Steel Crisis Proceduralism, Decisionism, and the Neoliberalization of the American State (1959-1982)

• In Event: Neoliberalism, Austerity, and State Retrenchment.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the protracted crisis of the American steel industry between 1959 and 1982 as a constitutive arena in the reorganization of U.S. economic governance commonly described as neoliberalization. Rather than treating steel’s collapse as simply reflective of broader structural or ideational transformations, the analysis shows how the crisis itself became a strategic site through which state capacities, policy repertoires, and the institutional grammar of state–capital relations were progressively reworked. In this way, the paper advances an institutionalist account centered on the evolving governing dilemmas of the liberal state and the problem-solving constraints that structured official responses to industrial decline.
Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal governance, the paper interprets neoliberalization as emerging from a structural antinomy internal to liberal economic governance, in which periods of industrial and macroeconomic strain repeatedly pressed state actors toward decisive interventions to manage distributive conflict even as those same actors remained constrained by the rule-bound procedures they had previously institutionalized. Schmitt’s distinction between proceduralism and liberal decisionism thus helps clarify how liberal regimes attempt to manage this tension. Whereas proceduralism seeks to stabilize conflict through routinized, impersonal administration, liberal decisionism reappears when officials confront situations that exceed inherited policy repertoires but must still justify their actions within a procedurally legitimate framework.
Against this backdrop, the paper traces three phases in federal responses to the steel crisis, beginning with the erosion of corporatist proceduralism (1959-1962), followed by the expansion and limits of liberal decisionism (1962-1974), and culminating in the emergence and breakdown of technified proceduralism (1974-1982). Across these episodes, policymakers repeatedly redefined the steel problem and recalibrated the policy instruments they regarded as viable. As earlier repertoires faltered, distributive conflict was progressively displaced into more judicialized, technified, and internationalized arenas, gradually reorganizing the institutional foundations and practical modalities of U.S. economic governance.

Author

• Bradley Castiglia, University of California, San Diego