Tackling the Crisis: A Review of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste

Making sense of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath is a daunting task. While there have been a number of popular press attempts like Michael Lewis’ The Big Short or the documentary Inside Job, the latter of which took painstaking details to paint a picture of the connections and players involved in the crisis, Philip Mirowski asks in his recent book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown why the aftermath of the 2008 crisis did not spur some broad based legitimation crisis in the dominant channels and organs of the world’s economic and intellectual elite. Mirowski’s answer is well reasoned but also somewhat depressing: economic intellectuals take for granted the scientific elements of economic theory, and, reading deductively, understand the crisis as expressing not some retroactive judgment of economics as a discipline but instead as expressing a sort of intrinsic unpredictability with which those interested in markets and economics will just have to live.

The book proceeds to make four arguments that are of vital interest to rhetoricians and those studying the intersection between argumentation and social theory. 1) Demands for “consensus” reinforce orthodoxy within economic thought, 2) Economics departments and economics faculty suffer from a feedback loop problem wherein the economic incentives from coming to conclusions that will sound good to private sector employers in the financial sector pollute academic conclusions, 3) “Everyday neoliberalism” is sustained through quotidian vectors of representations and encounter that naturalize economic decisions as proceeding from some godlike mantra as opposed to effects of human action, and 4) Public interventions by public intellectuals in the area of economics like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman were counterproductive insofar as they reproduced the notion that there were a limited number of “sides” to the debate over the crash while also suggesting a minor economic corrective rather than a wholesale philosophical corrective was needed to explain not only the crash but also the failure of those who helped cause it to reflect on their role.

I was very taken by Mirowski’s argument regarding “everyday neoliberalism,” because while it is, in some ways painfully obvious, he does lay out some compelling evidence worthy of consideration. For example, phenomena like the Freakonomics series, which tries to explain almost every sector of society in economic terms, induce a certain kind of talking about the economy as something natural. Or, as a friend and I routinely discuss, the rise of advanced statistics movements in sports, emblematized by Moneyball, brings left-progressives over to the side of the market with sexy talk of “market inefficiencies” and opposition to troglodyte scouts and coaches who just can’t understand the links between economics and progress. Another good example Mirowski cites, and one worthy of further study by rhetoricians, is the utter invisibility of any class outside the “middle class” in the vocabularies of news media, pundits, and politicians. Again, another rather obvious point, but stunningly demonstrative: could you go through the roster of leading politicians in the two major American political parties right now and find a dozen references to “the poor” or “impoverished” in their speeches and prepared materials? One wonders if this signals a deep, deep internalization of the market mantra: don’t mention the poor because those who are impoverished are so as a matter of their nature as opposed to their will?

The book’s argument with respect to the drive for consensus as a factor evading substantive engagement with the poverties of economic theory is also powerful. Mirowski is not only a professor of economics but also of the history of philosophy. Hence it comes as little surprise that he makes a claim about the relationship of how knowledge is presumed to work within expert spheres. Specifically, he argues that there is a tendency to assume that “expertism” implies “consensus.” Thus where there is absence of consensus, we do not have expertism as such but instead failed knowledge production wherein all claims are suspect. Reading from the famous Frank Luntz global warming memo which suggested that a consensus on climate science would force legislative action on global warming, Mirowski suggests that this thinking has proven especially pernicious in the case of economics, because while public intellectuals like Paul Krugman lob bombs at central members of what Mirowski calls the “Neoliberal Thought Collective” the work this does is often to assure the public that there is no economic consensus while the existence of a thing called “the market” (in the public view, I mean: Mirowski is very clear that for mainstream neoliberal economists “the market” does not exist, but is something which makes its own way in the world independent of economists) continues unabated. Thus the market continues to do its work even as what “economists” think comes to be represented as presumptively uncertain. If the central task for those concerned with the sustainability of the global system and especially those concerned with the massive inequalities and injustices that exist in the world is to challenge the mantra that “what markets say is reality” then minor repairs and rescue operations only emphasize that while markets do know, humans, even experts, cannot.

If I had to say a couple things critical of the book, they would be that Mirowski insufficiently theorizes the history of “expertism” as a concept in American public life and also that he struggles to locate the argument of the later Michel Foucault found in The Birth of Biopolitics, which Mirowski cites extensively. Regarding expertism, Mirowski assumes that the distance between the deliberating public and the realm of experts is one made by the confusion and misinformation circulated in public disputes about the economy. This is, as far as it goes, correct. But Mirowski could do more to highlight how politicians and pundits navigate the constitutive distance between “economics” and something like a fluid conception of “the public” (thought of as a discursive figure as opposed to a demographic) by pointing to how the existence of things as they are ratifies them retroactively as expressions of a general economic will. That is, simply by being, things are as “the market” says they are, which bakes in a certain level of presumption about the status quo. Mirowski seems, in many parts of the book, to understand this, which makes it all the more puzzling that he insists on reading the Foucault of The Birth of Biopolitics as descriptive rather than prescriptive: he insists that “Foucault…declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth.” (p. 100). In fact, the Foucault of these later lectures provides one of the best possible answers to the classical dispute about false consciousness that has dogged progressives, because he argues that the market comes to function as if it were the only site of knowledge to explain the characteristics of a vast set of “non-economic” sectors i.e. cultural, familial, etc. Nothing in Foucault says it has to be this way, only that it is.

Overall, this book was very helpful for pushing one to think about the aftermath of the political crisis. It’s also very accessible: Mirowski has taken pains to write in a manner accessible to more than just theory-minded academics.  And for the more academically inclined he makes a host of interesting points, like his ability to connect the influence of Carl Schmitt to the Chicago School of economics. I would recommend it to anyone interested in neoliberalism, the 2008 financial crisis, social theory, or the rhetoric of science/rhetoric of inquiry.

O'Blogging on St. Patrick's Day: Main St./Wall St.

The emergence of the Wall St./Main St. theme in the 2008 presidential campaign was a crucial narrative moment. While political narratives opposing the "big city" economists to the ordinary economic agents of flyover America are as old as the progressive populism espoused by William Jennings Bryan (if not older), the salience of such themes fades in and out of public circulation on the basis of several contextual factors, including A) the current state of the economy, B) class sensitivity, and C) the visibility of the moneyed and urbane. While previous outbreaks of outrage at white collar workers for financial improprieties had been seen not only during the Great Depression but also during the S&L scandals of the 1980's, the Wall St./Main St. division that erupted in September 2008 was particularly important because it happened at the height of a hard fought presidential campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama.

Almost as soon as the financial woes of Lehman Bros. were made public, a Wall St./Main St. narrative began to emerge in the media. On September 15, the Chicago Tribune reported that "Few Americans have a direct connection to the events unfolding on Wall Street, but practically everyone has a stake in the game." By September 18th it was reported in The Business Times that Wall Street had fundamentally "lost touch" with the economy. The explicit use of language contrasting Wall St. with Main St. increased, and became a staple of presidential campaign rhetoric up until the early November election.

Rhetorical theory teaches us one way to read the emergence of these discourses is that they serve as ways of ordering or making more understandable a world riven with anxiety and indeterminacy. As Kenneth Burke argues, the production of scapegoats is part of a ritual of victimage which serves to consolidate a collective identity in ways that render negative or threatening political circumstances as emerging in opposition to said collective identity. Rhetorical theorists have tended to focus on the political implications resulting from the use of such rhetoric, whether in Burke's incredibly important essay "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle" or more contemporary efforts like Brian Ott and Eric Aoki's work on Matthew Shepherd, Jeremy Engels work on Nietzchean victimage, and Richard Nixon, or Barry Brummett's work on symbolic form.

Engels' essay is of particular interest to me, as his argument in his Rhetoric Society Quarterly essay "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority" is about how scapegoating as a political ritual perpetuates its subjects' victimized status by allowing them to perpetually wallow and identify with their sense of resentment and anger at the world. Rather than understanding anger and anxiety as temporary conditions, Engels understands that there are rhetorical mechanisms that prolong these rituals of victimization. An angle I want to add is that it seems that there are also ways in which scapegoating discourses may unknowingly or unthinkingly perpetuate the angers and resentments they attempt to foster.

In the case of the "Wall St./Main St." binary, blaming Wall St. may have the effect of accelerating rather than postponing an existential crisis for the aggrieved subject. As has been written elsewhere and ad nauseam, American politics and society is saturated with a notion that the liberal individual is an absolute sovereign, and the individual choices/decisions carry a certain kind of legitimacy not on the basis of the results they create but instead from their simple, tautological status as individual decisions. Such a fantasy works with efficacy during times of relative economic prosperity because the individual investment into the economy at large is validated with recourse to a simple kind of correspondence: I am both acting and living, and the economy is going along well. We would expect, then, during times of economic destitution and crisis, that the capacity and competency of the self as an individual actor would be threatened, because a flailing economy indexes the flailingness of those subjects operating within it.

Here is where the scapegoating mechanisms of "Wall St./Main St." come in: blaming Wall St. for the large scale 2008 financial crisis resolves the crisis offered by economic disrepair by distributing the responsibility for blame at levels far above that of the average American. Such a maneuver taps into a historically rich tableau of populist narratives which paint good and hardworking "normal" Americans against an opposed and greedy moneyed class. However, what goes overlooked is that this rhetoric may actually serve to exacerbate rather than reduce the anxiety and tension in American subjects. After all, in order to believe the finance derivates, greedy financial managers, and loan-crazy banks were behind the financial crisis, one has to admit to their own lack of agency in the realm of economic affairs. Because most people have moved away from the "storing money under a mattress" financial model, they conceive of themselves as public economic actors. One needs nearly spend time detailing the wealth of financial avenues available to "normal" people, like the website eTrade which promises to elevate everyone's individual economic judgment to the plane of Wall Street and enable them to make their own sound investment decisions. However, in the case of a broad financial collapse, very few people are immune from financial ruin: not only because many people unknowingly or unwittingly invest their money in unstable sectors of the economy, but also because of a general credit crunch that results from a constricted financial environment.

One result of the "Wall St./Main St." demagoguery, then, is that it evacuates the agency of Main Street. Main St. can only be the passive victim of Wall St.'s sinister machinations if it has little to no say in the matter. This might not ordinarily be a problem, except that because of the tightly held fantasy of individual choice, the evacuation of "average America's" agency is not a minor matter but instead an assault upon the constitutive fantasy of individual identity: that the exercise of individual choice, is in and of itself, meaningful and tends towards "the good." Piling onto this is the rather massive "perspective by incongruity" that would be witnessed were Americans to interrogate their own investments and roles in the financial collapse: even if you believe that the 2008 financial crisi was primarily the fault of derivatives traders and an economic system going off the rails, it is undeniable that a collective investment in the idea of individual economic security contributes to Americans rolling the dice on risky financial decisions like "out of their depth" home loans.

Many have wondered why the political era of the Obama presidency has been besotten with extreme political rhetoric. (It is unclear whether this rhetoric is worse than in the past, but its effects on creating an atmosphere of partisanship in the Congress is uniquely terrible). I think one cause of this (aside from the obvious inputs of Obama's race, a collapse of the classic "southern states" strategy started by Richard Nixon, and the slow creep of pseudo-libertarianism into a central position in the GOP architecture) is that the 2008 financial crisis was as symbolically important as it was in real economic terms: the truth of it radically threatened to pull out the rug from the fantasy of liberal individualism held near and dear (and it should be noted, a support of liberal individualism is a fairly bipartisan fantasy). The initial anger over the collapse, which political operatives then doubled down on by facilitating and encouraging the "bailout anger" which eventually condensed around Rick Santelli to produce the Tea Party movement, was an anger that allowed subjects to disavow their own relatively miniscule agency in affairs of the economy, a miniscule amount of agency that would be tough to square with the pervasive fantasy of individual action as highly economically meaningful. The bipartisan character of this sentiment can also be seen in the emergence of the Occupy movement: both parties seem to understand that the economy is "bigger than all of us" but struggle to articulate intelligible demands to remedy the problem of extreme power disparities in our political climate (for the record, I think the incoherence of the Tea Party's political agenda signals that their disavowal is considerably more tragic: Occupy refuses to "double down" on the liberal individual for the most point, and its supposed "unintelligible demands" are a sign of its politicization of the economy rather than a kind of failure of New Social Movement).

We might then think about economic demagoguery as a type of particularly uncontrollable political rhetoric of scapegoating: in order for an audience to acede to its major premise, a major premise of American subjectivity itself is challenged and threatens. Because our identities are structured in the form of a sort of a defensive armor (qua Lacan) we should expect the defensive maneuveres on the part of identity in response to this existential threat to manifest themselves in the active affects and politically contentious discourses and actions of our current milieu.

The Politics of the "Bain Capital" Slurs

Not long ago, the media world was atwitter with the news that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry (now dearly departed) had decided to break an unwritten rule of conservative politics and launch attacks on Mitt Romney for his role as a cutthroat efficiency maven while at Bain Capital, a consulting firm. Gingrich's attacks prompted a serious outcry from pundits, who either concerned that Romney wasn't well suited to rebutting the arguments or thought Gingrich had a legitimate point that might resonate with an electorate who placed the economy at the top of their list of concerns.

The issue was what most called Romney's record of "creative destruction" (Romney's preferred term as well) while working at Bain. Romney successfully eliminated inefficiencies, turned failing companies into successful ones, and also let (made?) companies that were clunkers fail. Romney had previously played on his private sector success as an asset in an election that might come down the economy: this is particularly true when you consider that Romney, as a conservative governor in a very blue state, had to make a number of concessions on liberal issues (health care, gay rights) that wouldn't play particularly well to a base still in the mood for a candidate who could not just mildly differentiate themself from Barack Obama but define themself in an entirely oppositional way. This means that Romney's record in the private sector is absolutely a key linchpin for his campaign: in order to compare himself to Obama, long a man of the public sector, Romney needs to be able to wield a mantle of expertise on all matters economic, based mostly on him "having really done it" while Obama stood on the political sidelines and mettled.

I doubt sincerely whether the facts of Romney's tenure at Bain will much matter for messaging purposes in either the Republican primary (which, btw, Romney will probably still win handily. For the love of God, Newt freaking Gingrich?) or the general election. And I mean that in the following sense: even if the "fact" is that Romney made companies leaner and freed up inefficiencies to both redistribute workers and create more profits (that then flow back into the economy) Romney's narrative will have to first have an awkward encounter with the obverse side of the American dream: that for all the winners in America, there are losers, too, and those losers might either not want to confront their status as such, or might be losers only by virtue of some factor beyond their control (rather than say, their lack of fitness or capacity for certain sorts of work).

To really understand why this matters, we need to go back to the Spring of 2008, when the economy was facing a difficult time, and Phil Gramm said openly that America, during tough economic times, had become "a nation of whiners." Immediately afterward Gramm, who had been a campaign surrogate and adviser for John McCain, took a less visible role in McCain's campaign after withering criticism from pundits, journalists, and ordinary Americans who understood their own dwindling economic prospects as something real, and not just part of a "mental recession." Of course, Gramm wasn't that wrong about the "mental recession" claim: conservatives and liberals alike tend to agree that attitudes (read: consumer confidence) impact the REAL measure of an economy's strength i.e. optimism, willingness to invest given the promise of profit, etc. This didn't matter: by calling those who were struggling "whiners" Gramm tapped into a fear that the typical discourses of liberal individualism in America are effective at displacing: the fear that one might just not be good enough.

After all, Americans are coached that they are special, unique, and exceptional folks, gifted with talents and powers that will help them get to a place of real material and spiritual success. We can find evidence of this either in advertisements (which often hold that the simple capacity to choose the right product makes us special), political discourses (show me a politician who has publicly disavowed the American Dream, and I will show you a non-entity. Moreover, this dream is accomplished by hard work and the application of ingenuity, rather than positioned as an effect of a combination of talent and luck), and plucky cultural narratives about overcoming adversity (Ragged Dick, or choose your superhero). Financial and personal success is an index of one's talent and agency. This accords with how exceptionalist narratives work: if we achieve our City on a Hill through a combination of hard work and good luck, there is nothing to distinguish us from others who work hard other than some kind of beneficial cosmic fortune. On the other hand, if we own that City on a Hill because we mixed our labor with it, it is ours.

This is different from the account of virtue Aristotle gives in the Politics, where talent and hard work are not enough. Chance is preserved as an element contributing to greatness: with talent and hard work but bad luck, one is simply not great. Now this initially seems harsh, but on a second blush it provides a rather appealing account for how to judge success because it installs a kind of ontological humility upon those who succeed: they are never as great as their successes, but they are also (presuming they work hard) never as bad as their failures.

What does it mean, then, for politics to take place on a plane where chance has been eviscerated in favor of an omnicompetent liberal subject who is all knowing, all seeing, and all succeeding? Firstly, it means that those who have not succeeded will struggle to be understood as victims of chance or bad fortune: instead, their status as less materially successful will be read as an index of their competence and effectiveness as a human. (Think of the health care patient facing death lustily booed during an early GOP primary debate: this only makes sense if they are facing a fate they earned). Second, this acts to determine in advance how individuals are understood in a way that tautologically secures one's position in the social hierarchy: not being well off indicates you lack that special something. Instead of the possibility that you have encountered challenges and failed to defeat them, challenges are denaturalized, and thought to collapse easily upon the power of AMERICAN INDIVIDUAL HARDWORKING MCAWESOMEPERSON.

When Phil Gramm complains that America has become a nation of whiners, it is exactly the last thing that anyone who is poor off wants to hear. After all, they've been coached and told and encouraged to think that they are special, talented, and that if they just worked hard things would work out. And yet sometimes, they don't. Without chance, we get a nation of whiners instead of nation of folks facing some hard luck. Without chance, we understand a health care bill that rewards people who have bad market acumen. Without chance, we understand a social safety net to be a form of social Darwinism rather than insurance against fortune's worst.

But without chance, Romney's acumen at diagnosing businesses' flaws and inefficiencies enables him to straightforwardly personify the reasoned decisions that displace many within the economy. Quick reminder: subjectivity works through processes of negative definition and scapegoating, rarely trending towards the positive and/or processes of mortification which humble the subject. Folks without jobs are unlikely to understand their bad situation as something which they have entirely earned themselves. One person's "inefficiencies" are another persons livelihood. If Romney's professional legacy becomes understood as personifying and embodying what the conservative principles of "increased efficiency" mean then in an election where the economy matters, his professional success will become a millstone around his neck. "Efficiency" and other such buzzwords work effectively as abstract concepts, but have a more difficult road to hoe when people can place them in a context that ensures a personal identification against them. Put it this way: you can repeat over and over that a rising tide helps all boats, but when some boats aren't doing so well, they might not give a damn about the narrative.

Political Theory, Representation, and Economic Crisis

Both political theory and economic theory must account for the question of representation: how to make a government or a market into an effectively functioning quilting point for a political imaginary without becoming so powerful that the emptiness of such institutions of peoples threatens a legitimation crisis. At least one way that Rousseau managed the crisis of representation was, as Honig notes in Democracy and the Foreigner, was through the introduction of a "Foreign Founder" who could sidestep the democratic crisis threatened by having a politics defined purely by a people. If there is is nothing external to the people, then there is no such thing as politics (Schmitt, Arendt, what have you). The figure of the foreign founder created a not-entirely-natural yet not-entirely-mythical figure that could permit decisionism, and in so doing would interrupt what would otherwise be a troubling negative feedback loop of popular sovereignty. The American founders could not resort to myths of foreign founders, since they were in fact foreigners in their own space. Instead, they articulated republican institutions as the mechanism to interrupt this feedback loop: the roots of decisionism came to be known in the split between government and people that inaugurated the people at the same moment that it sabotaged their totality, or full democratic being.

Similarly, Adam Smith-style capitalism was capable of sidestepping crises in representation that might otherwise boggle or make a mockery of market prediction. Because their remained certain services and functions for which the market was thought incapable, the danger that economics might become incapable of recognizing itself was minimal: the state served as a regulatory bulwark capable of repeatedly reminding the market (and marketized subjects) of its limits. The aggressive increase in class consciousness, characteristic of American identity through the founding period and heightened first during the Civil War and then again during the Progressive-era political responses to the heightened perils of the Industrial Revolution, further served to stabilize not only a "political" people (because the state could be captured for use on either side of political struggle for and against various peoples) meant that the market was effectively politicized by calls to government action on social, political, and economic issues.

The sixties signified a very serious sea-change in how American political identity thought about the relationship between government and people: those who boosted and organized for Barry Goldwater beginning at the end of the 1950's operated under the assumption that an ideological war between government and market had been waged and that government had won: the overweening presumption, even for Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, was that as long as the government had the capacity to intervene into a market, that market could not be trusted to provide to maximum efficacy the products and promises it had made. The Goldwater organization, as Rick Perlstein among others have pointed out, lost the battle in the 1964 presidential election but one the war by producing a vision of "the American people" constituted not through internal oppositions between peoples but instead by producing the liberal individual as the natural (one might even say ontological) contrapuntal opposite of the state. The result was that governmental interventions into the market could now be taken in one of two ways: they could either be read as governmental intervention to fix problems where the "market" had failed, or they could be understood as distortions of what would otherwise be a perfectly natural economic outcome. Because "the people" now took on an ontologically oppositional position versus the government, presumption lied on the side of an interpretation which, because discourses repeated reify and reconstitute in familiar rather than challenging ways identities, governmental intervention tended more often than not to be read unnecessary rather than pointing to inefficiencies in the market in which "the people" by virtue of being the market all would share participation in.

We might quibble with critics of neoliberalism, but if we accept as a starting point their thesis that more rather than less of the system and lifeworld is today given over to internal self-regulation by the invisible hand of the market, we can see that what is at stake in times of economic turmoil is a crisis of representation of the sort political theorists like Rousseau most feared: if the market amalgamates more and more political and social life (and indeed, while there remain material zones of un-capture, one need only to closely read the transcript of a single GOP debate to find a near-consensus as to the IDEAL and therefore "real" extent of ideology in this case) then there is no space for a politics (that is, the ability to define a people) because the market is the beginning and the end of politics as such. A "people" defined tautologically by their status as people (that is to say, a collective identity ratified by nothing less and nothing more than its being a people over and against the existence of a government whose existence in an imaginary sense is democratic but in a real sense is ontologically opposed to that very identity it authorizes) do not really exist, except insofar as they are not coterminus with the government. Economic crises threaten a crisis of representation, in which the true culprit for the crisis is unrepresentable (because if the crisis is the market, and the market=the people, the market cannot be taken as the source of its own failure, as it is not judged in neoliberal discourse through its success or failure but instead by its existence as a market) and the inability to produce (we might say embody) the market speaks to what Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics as the kind of shadow chasing game of individualized market economics: a market always chasing its own non-existence, always making, retroactively, a kind of invisible hand that never quite lives up the sum of its judgments. It is in this vein that we should read discourses that respond to the economic crisis: many of them, it seems, want to embody and make real the villains behind the crisis, whether they be Wall Street fat cats, irresponsible homeowners, sinister loan officers, or a government incapable of reining in its own spending. Because the market remains unrepresentable, however, something in these scapegoatings will awesome seem to miss its mark.

"They Don't Have a Demand"

So I guess there's some obligatory waxing about "Occupy Wall Street" to be done. In general, I'm quite interested in how people attenuate themselves to the movement. There tend to be four or so different responses:

1. "These damn dirty hippies are seditiously ruining our country: just like their forbearers in the Sixties, we should make sure that they know that the vocal and smelly minority won't have a say in politics." This response tends to be conservative. I should also note that to the extent that violence and disobedience are overcoded as the responsibility of the crowd in the cortex of our imaginary, I am sympathetic to quasi-fascist arguments that the protestors should be held to a higher standard of behavior from within, simply to defend their optics. The counter argument, of course, is that even if nothing approaching "inappropriate" behavior is done the media frame will inevitably construct some such action out of misleading bits into a spectacle. Perhaps. This is no reason not to try.

2. "I have sympathies, but what is their PLAN??!" I find this argument the most difficult to stomach, in part because it is the argument where the moderate-pseudo progressive left meets a conservative complaint. Actually, thats the whole reason. Look, in the last 2 years we have seen a resounding wave of conservative populism, a political movement that appears as a function of grassroots beliefs mixed with a healthy does of rhetoric about the "American people" in a way that makes most progressive gaze lustfully at the American flag. Of course, when one pushes hard on the Tea Party for real plans, one comes up against a barrier: those that refuse to defend substantial cuts in Medicare and Social Security, when you get down to policy particulars, do not have a real PLAN to address the liberty-based concerns for which they advocate. This, as Obama has recently been fond of saying albeit a bit less appropriately, is math. However, the reason the Tea Party's arguments have sustained and now embedded themselves as relevant fragments within the deliberative framework of the GOP is because they work within an effective taken for granted frame: that government is bad, and its forces tend towards inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Conversely, the progressive/liberal democratic party has tended to concede space to this argument, generally arguing only for government when its a necessity but generally speaking about the need to free the "American people" to make the country great again. Now there are exceptions: you have your millionaire surtax, your Wall Street/Main Street binary, but the recent decision to NOT push harder EPA regulations underscores the Democratic mainstream's tendency to collapse in the middle MUCH faster than their conservative counterparts. I would like to assert (as many smarter and more eloquent theorists and writers have already) that this is because (until OWS) progressives were conceding the basic thesis of conservative arguments: that government is bad. There are exceptions to this, but it seems like "States of Exception" are more easily generated in the face of an existential threat to all Americans (terrorism, ahem) than in the face of a partial or part-ordered amount of discomfort for many Americans (but crucially, not the universal image of hardworking "Americans" whose suffering must never be read inductively as an indict of America itself.) The reason why "what's the plan" is so frustrating as a response to OWS is that before you have a plan, you have to understand the political terrain. The status quo understanding of the political terrain treats the market and the actors of market capitalism as unvarnished natural goods. OWS is beginning the work of challenging this presumption. So a plan? That might come. For now, you've got to not rewrite common sense, but just make it thinkable that its no longer common sense.

3. "They've been at this a while." They've been there for a few weeks, whereas the unabashed declarations of love from Hayek and Mises are decades old. Lets holster the speed gun, kids.

4. You have cautious support on editorial pages of major daily newspapers. That it is even being covered is a big deal, although I have healthy skepticism's about Michael Warner's "mere attention" thesis: if something receives "mere attention" as an abject/external point to generate another kind of publicity, thats far different from fawning adulation. I do think that this everyday support is a powerful point to argue that the insistence of the crowd that they are just "regular Americans" is a pretty amazing thing. Once the state and not the market became the enemy of the American people, the Clinton-era welfare caves became a fait accompli. If "the people" can become read not as an effect of the government's displacement of their true and thorough virtuosity, but instead as evidence of a linkage between government and popular interest against the market (monsterized in this case at the heart of finance) then that might really do something.

Slightly Tempering a Love for Hannah

There is an Arendtian moment of sorts a-flutter. Hannah Arendt's work is extremely popular in political science, political theory, and rhetoric, to name just a few disciplines. The appeal of Arendt's work is obvious: she produces, as Bonnie Honig has noted, a theory of the political that claims to be able to produce a kind of political space that is made without the failures and violences that have attached to previously constructed political space (the concept of natality). This, combined with what some have called her notion of the "portable polis," the idea that people through acting and speaking together can constitute the political, have made her work, especially the The Human Condition, particularly salient. Her essay on "statelessness" in The Origins of Totalitarianism provides an insightful and key summary of the problem of compatibility between liberal regimes of rights and the nation state, work incredibly important for the work of thinkers like Giorgio Agamben. And On Revolution remains a key text for political thinkers interested in translation and comparative work between American and European politics.

So this blog post will signal something of a break, both with these wider trends, and with my own internal love for Arendt's work. I want to make one brief argument, utilizing mostly The Human Condition and On Revolution. My thesis is that Hannah Arendt at times cedes the space of the political to the market, and her work, while a stunning and soaring rebuke to the state-sanctioned totalitarianism of the 20th century, nevertheless should be approached with some caution as the locus of the kinds of power that generates violence today may be located more and more outside the strictly understood boundaries of sovereign state power.

I will make two warrants to sustain the claim. The first is taken from The Human Condition, where Arendt avers that politics occurs whenever speaking beings share space. The production of the political testifies to difference, and difference itself is the irrevocable mark of the fact of humanity's political existence, that there is something more, beyond the oikos of the Greeks. Arendt breaks from the darker side of the Frankfurt school (a H/T to Joan Faber McAlister on this point) by turning to her idea of natality as the key concept for how politics builds in the possibility of hope: what comes of politics is never reducible to the politics that has come before, so long as differentiated humans participate in the construction of the shared space. However, the driving force behind this is the desire for immortality, a hope that the works that one does might not be lost to history. There is then, somewhere, a tempered appreciation for the good of competition that lurks in Arend't work. This in and of itself does not invalidate her approach; one my invalidate capitalist arrangements and still believe that competition is good. But such a claim would require that competition results in the production of a better shared space, not one that is less diverse.

Second warrant: Arendt's account of the history of democracy, "the people," and republicanism in On Revolution (brilliant explicated by Andreas Kalyvas in a book called Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary that I greatly recommend) is a stunning account of how the system of American government produces the tools for citizens to understand themselves ironically with respect to the formulation of collective identity. Such humility would seem an utter necessity in the light of the state sponsored fascism of Nazi's, Stalinist's and others (Arendt herself a Jewish German). So Arend't love letter to the American founders comes as no surprise: the American system of government breaks up "the people," eradicating their momentum to become calcified in unreflexive cycles of self-congratulation that turn national identity from a contingent functionary into an essential or natural piece of identity that can then authorize violence. Such a function, however, strikes me as potentially problematic if we find ourselves contesting neoliberalism, which I understand to be a variant of capitalism wherein functions of the state once thought to be essential to its calling are now outsourced to private enterprise, and the space of politics (and the construction of a commons, in terms of humanity, the environment, etc.) is restricted more and more to politics in the sense of a negative liberty, one that authorizes the free exercise of reason by Lockean subjects and little else.

In this case, the tendency of government (and of republican institutions) to break up "the people" is more troubling: the typical response to neoliberal discourses and procedures is to erect a commons that testifies to the necessity of government intervention, and helps to make the case that some goods cannot be trusted to the private. However, in the Arendtian model, there are not only incentives to challenge the construction of a commons ("politics is everywhere"), but also few if any "common goods" can long be sustained as publicly held because the political context of America breaks up people's own relationships to collective identity. The welfare state, it seems, might founder on the inability for the articulation of a shared sustainable future.

A few possible rebuttals: one might note, with queer theorist Lee Edelman, that a common future is regularly constructed, and it just happens to be done more effectively by a right-situated set of political actors. One might easily rebut that the success of such discourses is found in part in their ability to segregate and disavow the republican tradition in America: by insisting repeatedly on the "wholeness" and "futurity" of the American family, space for an ironic or tempered relationship to the fantasies they advance is eradicated.

One might also object that Arendt herself in the mid-century declared that the great "Spirit of Revolution" that the Founders possessed had been lost, and that The Human Condition's final great missives against the mass society of consumerism and so forth indicate that Arendt herself was well aware that the problem of mass society was rooted in the production of utilitarian ends/means mechanisms of thought intimately familiar to capitalist logics. As far as it goes I think this is correct. But this does not respond to the charge: if The Human Condition understands utility calculations the proceed unthought as a problem, this only demonstrates that the potential for a reflexivity about what "needs" are under late capitalism is more urgent, and that the need for a shared commons is greater than ever.

There are a number of problems with engaging in rank populism: xenophobia, declines in the quality of social service, and other attendant dangers present themselves. Nevertheless, a common language of needs is a necessary language in a world where neoliberalism is on the march. And Arendt's brilliant success in providing normative support for projects that fragment and break up "the people," preventing their aggregation, are something of an obstacle. So take note, scholars: Arendt's responses to the problems of state-based violence may suffer a bit in translation where the market is an increasingly important source of violence today.