Diseased Neoliberalism

Mack Penner

For more than a decade, there has been a flourishing cottage industry in predicting and proclaiming the demise of the “international regime” called neoliberalism.^[1] An opposite if not equal enterprise in disclaiming such proclamations has tagged along.^[2] Lately, though, this discursive equilibrium has all but crumbled as blunt-force events, emanating most of all from the United States, seem to force the conclusion that, at last, something has truly cracked. The neoliberal era that began in the 1970s has now, it seems, come to an end, buried, perhaps surprisingly, by the forces of the far-right.

 Amidst the daily maelstrom of those blunt-force events, drawing up a compendium is a Sisyphean task. Sticking to the general, and leaning on an existing assessment, it is helpful to refer to the political economist Branko Milanovic who early in the year declared that the second Trump administration “marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism. Both of its components are gone. Globalism had now been converted into nationalism, neoliberalism has been made to apply to the economic sphere only. Its social parts—racial and gender equality, free movement of labor, multiculturalism—are dead. Only low tax rates, deregulation and worship of profit remain.”[3] Fair summary.

But it is not necessarily so obvious that the developments to which Milanovic refers represent the end of neoliberalism in an absolute sense. After all, if it seems relatively straightforward to claim that the neoliberal era has concluded, it is much more difficult to comment with any precision or certainty on what has replaced it. As such, a favoured concept lately is one inherited from Antonio Gramsci, the great theorist of “interregnum,” a notion invoked frequently in aphoristic terms as a moment during which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” In such a moment, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”^[4] But morbidity and mortality are not the same thing, and the distinction is important. Indeed, it is better to think of neoliberalism as a diseased hegemony rather than a dead one. Instead of an old order dying and a new one struggling to be born from a contest between opposed movements, what we have instead is an old order radicalizing from within while nothing new is in sight.

Both of these dynamics—the radicalization of neoliberalism and the absence of alternatives, particularly from the left—have been decades in the making. And if there is any one scholarly guide to these developments, and the relationship between them, it’d be the work of political theorist Wendy Brown. More than 25 years ago, in a reflection on “left melancholy,” Brown explained the inability of social movements on the left to challenge neoliberal hegemony as a function of those movements’ paradoxical conservatism. “If the contemporary Left often clings to the formations and formulations of another epoch,” Brown wrote, “this means that it literally renders itself a conservative force in history—one that not only misreads the present but installs traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to risk and upheaval belongs.”^[5] That is, to the extent that it failed to apprehend what it was up against in the international regime of neoliberalism, the left failed to rise to the challenge(s) of the peak neoliberal era in the 1990s and after.

While one might want to quibble with Brown’s broad strokes, it would be hard to argue persuasively that she wasn’t onto something. Indeed, what her own subsequent work on neoliberalism and democracy has since shown is that in the absence of a compelling counter-movement, the development of neoliberalism has hollowed out democratic practices and institutions in such a way as to further impede the path to something else and something better, while simultaneously paving the way for neoliberalism to mutate and move in more radical directions. In 2015’s Undoing the Demos, Brown showed how the neoliberal era produced a political subjectivity grounded so strongly in economic calculation as to nearly preclude the possibility of conceiving politics in any other terms. Instead of thinking about politics as a collective project, perhaps even one oriented around principles of justice and equality, the “relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism” encouraged, if not forced, people to think of themselves as little units of human capital, strategizing and posturing for their own valorization and thinking scarcely at all about, say, solidaristic or social relations with other people.^[6]

The economic “rationality” of neoliberalism, an anti-democratic development in its own right, was a leverage point for the far-right. In response to the “political earthquake of November 2016,” when Donald Trump was first elected US President, Brown wrote In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, partially amending the arguments of Undoing the Demos by placing greater emphasis on the moral dimensions of neoliberal reason. By attending especially closely to the thought of neoliberal paragon Friedrich Hayek, Brown (not the only scholar to do this but surely among the most effective) examined the moral elements that had long featured in neoliberal ideas. “More than a project of enlarging the sphere of market competition and valuation,” Brown revised herself, “Hayekian neoliberalism is a moral-political project that aims to protect traditional hierarchies by negating the very idea of the social and radically restricting the reach of democratic political power in nation-states.”^[7]

So yes, neoliberal ideas always had a moral edge, and that edge became difficult to ignore after 2016. But if November 2016 was a political earthquake, it registered not remotely so high on the Richter scale as either the subsequent earthquake of November 2024 or its aftershocks in the first months of 2025 where the second Trump administration has run amok. In this context, it is with impeccable timing that historian Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Hayek’s Bastards, arrives as a complement to and, if not explicitly, a refinement of the line of argument previously developed by Brown. What Slobodian has now shown is that the rise of the far-right is not simply the result of certain moral ideas in “classic” neoliberal thought bubbling to the surface, but a more active effort on the part of Hayek’s bastards—neoliberals active on the far-right, basically—to radicalize the tradition from within, in the process often “paying poor tribute to their master.”^[8]

In Slobodian’s telling, the radicalization of neoliberalism, at least among intellectuals, often occurred as a response to the apparent neoliberal successes of the 1990s and 2000s. As the end of the Cold War seemed to imply a neoliberal triumph, some refused to take the win and instead fretted either that their victory was illusive or even that it was somehow lamentable: “It was not just that neoliberals denied they had won the Cold War. They were afraid of the reality that would result if they actually had.” Neoliberalism was not always good enough for neoliberals, who in the absence of a communist bogey had to make a new one. And so they did, turning their ire towards the legacies of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s that had “injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, and ecological consciousness into the body politic.” As Slobodian describes the view of one of his key bastard characters, journalist Peter Brimelow, while socialism as such was a spent force it lived on “as a socialism of pigmentation instead of redistributed wealth.”^[9]

In developing the weapons that they’d use against their post-Cold War enemies, Hayek’s bastards turned, in their way, to nature. Availing themselves of a scientific language, they pioneered a “new fusionism,” linking the classic neoliberal defence of markets with what were indeed moral arguments, but more specifically moral arguments drawn from across various biological sciences. The result was a particular emphasis on what Slobodian calls the “three hards” of “hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.”^[10] At all turns, legitimate and even virtuous hierarchies were and are opposed to supposedly fantastical, unreal notions of equality. If Brown had previously shown that neoliberalism provided a political opportunity for the far-right, Slobodian shows how enthusiastically that opportunity was taken.

Brown’s assessment of left melancholy in the late-1990s suggested that the left’s inability to contest neoliberal hegemony was a function of its failure to clearly understand that hegemony, and almost three decades later the danger still lurks. The kind of conservative impulse that Brown diagnosed on the left almost three decades ago can still be seen, quite clearly, in assessments of the present crisis as being totally novel and singular, and thus requiring humble efforts of restoration rather than ambitious ones of visionary counter-politics.^[11] But if the present crisis, defined by a rising and self-confident politics of reaction, is understood historically as the diseased radicalization rather than the demise of neoliberalism, perhaps we might yet make a proper interregnum of our time. That is, we might begin to struggle toward a new order, doing so not with inherited instruction manuals but instead with new ones born from “a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society.”^[12] As diseased neoliberalism continues to self-generate all measure of morbid symptoms, we might find suddenly that there is all the more collective will to give it the death it deserves.

Mack Penner is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Calgary.

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[1] Perry Anderson writes about the “international regime of neoliberalism” in “Regime Change in the West?,” London Review of Books vol. 47 no. 6 (3 April 2025), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/perry-anderson/regime-change-in-the-west.

[2] In this venture, admittedly, yours truly was a participant. See Mack Penner, “The Rumors are False—Neoliberalism is Alive and Well,” Jacobin, 27 September 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/09/neoliberalism-history-market-civilizations-east-south.

[3] Branko Milanovic, “To the Finland Station: Trump as a Tool of History,” Global Inequality and More 3.0, Substack, 6 January 2025, https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/to-the-finland-station.

[4] For an exegetical source, see Gilbert Achar, “Morbid Symptoms: What Did Gramsci Really Mean?,” Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power vol. 1 (2021): 379-387.

[5] Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 vol. 26 no. 3 (Fall 1999): 25.

[6] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). Quotation from page 31.

[7] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Quotations from page 6 (“political earthquake”) and 13.

[8] Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (New York: Allen Lane, 2025). Quotation from page 17 (of an advance copy that may not be identical to the published version, which is out from both Allen Lane and, with a different subtitle, from Zone Books, as of 15 April 2025).

[9] Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards. Quotations, in order, from pages 14, 9, and 88.

[10] Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards, 21-24.

[11] See Adam Tooze, “This Global Warming Book is a Token from Another World,” The New York Times, 15 April 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/books/review/whats-left-malcolm-harris.html, a rather unenthusiastic review of Malcom Harris’s, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (New York: Little Brown, 2025).

[12] Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” 26.