'Authoritarian Neoliberalism': Crisis, the state, and the challenge of periodisation

Abstract

The current context is one marked by twin crises: a crisis of neoliberal capitalism, and a crisis of the liberal-democratic state. The failure of the western economies to overcome deflation, rising public and private debt, high unemployment and low investment rates in the post-Global Financial Crisis has fuelled debate on whether neoliberalism remains viable way to organise the economy. Concurrently, the aspiration of democracy is facing multiple challenges: from the failure of referenda to instigate democratic change, as seen in Greece; and conversely the success of referenda to limit political freedoms, as seen in Turkey. We are seeing rising anti-establishment and anti-statist movements across the world, alongside the use of constitutional and legal mechanisms to limit the scope of democratic politics. Responding to these material conditions, the concept of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ has been presented as a way to understand the current conjuncture. But surely neoliberalism – and capitalism more generally – always presented with authoritarian tendencies? On what grounds can it be argued, that there has been a ‘qualitative change’ in the way the state attempts to cohere the neoliberal project post-2007? This thesis argues that by separating the current moment of authoritarianism from a broader history of authoritarian tendencies, a ‘violent abstraction’ is made; the actual causal mechanisms producing the current crisis are obscured. If this periodisation is jettisoned, however, ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ presents the potential to refocus attention on the way that authoritarian state transformations across neoliberal history have dialectically strengthened and weakened the state. This dialectic offers a new perspective on the origins of the current crisis of the state, as apparent in countries as diverse as Britain, the US, and Hungary. By moving past the ‘violent abstraction’ of this periodisation, a renewed focus on state violence under neoliberalism offers a real contribution to our understanding of the current moment.