In my previous post I agreed with Wendy Brown and different critics of “neoliberalism” that one thing was genuinely new, and disturbing, in regards to the try to deal with schooling as producing “human capital”, a slim financial worth. I do suppose, nevertheless, that such critics enormously overplay their hand. That’s, they prolong the critique of “neoliberalism” to phenomena that aren’t even liberal, not to mention neo – to longstanding, deeply human issues that predate capitalism and its ideology.
In Brown’s case, the issue comes throughout most clearly in a footnote attacking David Brooks. Some years in the past within the New York Occasions, Brooks had written a shifting defence of traditional humanistic education:
Again when the humanities have been thriving, the main figures had a transparent definition of their mission and a fervent ardour for it. The job of the humanities was to domesticate the human core, the a part of an individual we’d name the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, “the darkish huge forest.”
This was probably the most inward and elemental a part of an individual. Once you go to a funeral and listen to a eulogy, that is normally the half they’re speaking about. Eulogies aren’t résumés. They describe the particular person’s care, knowledge, truthfulness and braveness. They describe the million little ethical judgments that emanate from that inside area.
The humanist’s job was to domesticate this floor — imposing mental order upon it, educating the feelings with artwork with a view to refine it, providing inspiring exemplars to get it correctly oriented.
Brooks’s defence, it appears to me, is kind of the other of the “human capital” method: it defends precisely these elements of schooling human cultivation left behind by the employability market. “Care, knowledge, truthfulness and braveness”, not to mention “the darkish huge forest” of “the human core”, received’t get you a job as a software program engineer or accountant.
But, in Undoing the Demos, in some way Brown manages to twist this defence into its precise reverse. She footnotes Brooks’s piece as in some way illustrating methods wherein the humanities “align with the neoliberal notion of constructing human capital.” (187n23) Why? Apparently as a result of Brooks’s method is about “constructing the thoughts and therefore securing a extra gratifying life for the person”. (187) However a conceptual slippage has occurred right here. Now, abruptly, the “neoliberal notion of constructing human capital” is not about slim financial worth, however about any manner wherein people domesticate themselves in any respect. And as soon as “neoliberal” begins being utilized in that manner, I submit, it turns into a totally incoherent idea, describing one thing neither liberal nor neo.
Brown presents Aristotle as implicitly providing a “sharp critique of a neoliberal desk of values”. On that I feel she is true: the world of human capital and slim financial worth may be very alien to Aristotle. Her characterization of Aristotle’s view is just not flawed:
Human life wholly certain to the manufacturing of wealth, whether or not laboring to supply it or hovering over its accumulation, is small and unrealized. The identical is true of human life that doesn’t develop artistic or mental capacities and doesn’t search to manipulate its personal affairs. (189-90)
But it appears to me that to “develop artistic or mental capacities” is precisely what’s being advocated in defences of the humanities like Brooks’s, that particularly confer with refining and cultivating the soul. The “care, knowledge, truthfulness and braveness” Brooks praises are nothing if not virtues – and even a passing familiarity with Aristotle is sufficient to know that cultivating advantage is on the very coronary heart of his issues.
Brown, then, in some way manages the exceptional feat of turning a defence of Aristotelian self-cultivation right into a supposed assault on it. How is that this doable? It appears to me that when Brown has picked up the hammer of anti-neoliberal critique, all the pieces involves appear like a nail. In an extra telling passage, Brown laments that in Brooks’s view the liberal arts “usually are not conceived as offering the varied capacities required for democratic citizenship. Quite, they’re conceived as one thing for people to imbibe like chocolate, apply like yoga, or make the most of like engineering.” And in some way, to her, “This can be a measure of how far neoliberalization has already gone.” (187-8)
The reference to yoga is instructive. Whereas fashionable posture-based yoga is a hybrid phenomenon that may be many issues, together with a competitive sport, its instructors nonetheless typically stress its philosophical roots within the classical Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: a textual content which emphasizes the cultivation of self-discipline and serenity, with the ultimate goal of kaivalya, “aloneness”. Thus classical yoga is definitely not about collaborating in democratic citizenship – however a particular type of obstinacy can be required to explain a textual content from the fifth century or earlier than as “neoliberal”. The cultivation of particular person advantage is, and at all times was, one thing far deeper than the capitalist financial transformations of the late twentieth and twenty first centuries.
However from this passage plainly so far as Brown is anxious, all the pieces that’s not tied to her perfect of collectively pursuing democracy counts as “neoliberal” – even when it predates unique liberalism! Such a view bespeaks a historic blindness, which is a disgrace coming from Brown, as Undoing the Demos comprises a richly detailed, deep, and considerate understanding of Western thinkers from Bentham onward. However one can solely describe all makes an attempt at particular person enchancment as “neoliberal” by ignoring the numerous pre-liberal views that concentrate on precisely this. Even leaving apart non-Western traditions just like the Yoga Sūtras and Buddhism (on which extra subsequent time), it ignores the Epicureans, who withdrew from the polis to “govern their very own affairs” in a monastic backyard, and Martin Luther, for whom the person stands alone earlier than God.
Discover that Brown doesn’t even cease with individualism. On this passage it seems that, for Brown, even issues that are mandatory elements of collective motion rely as neoliberal – most notably, engineering. Certainly Brown is aware of that the postwar welfare-state universities that she and I love couldn’t have been bodily constructed with out civil engineering! If engineering as a pursuit is essentially neoliberal, then the conclusion of Brown’s personal beliefs requires neoliberalism and is parasitic on it.
On this passage of Brown’s, then, the idea of neoliberalism has run amok, to the purpose the place it has change into utterly nonsensical. I do suppose the time period “neoliberalism” has some worth in describing the worldview based on which all the pieces (together with previously non-economic spheres like schooling) ought to be seen within the capitalist phrases of financial development or property rights. However that worldview is just not the worldview of Brooks’s precapitalist humanities, of yoga, and even of engineering taken as an entire. (Most engineering may view itself in a neoliberal manner – but when engineering as such is inherently neoliberal, then any battle in opposition to neoliberalism is and have to be already misplaced.) “Neoliberalism” was by no means an awesome time period to start with, on condition that it means roughly the other of what it sounds like it means. If the time period can’t be saved on a brief leash – confined to its correct that means that refers to capitalist financial logic – then we’re possible higher off with out it.
