Mitchell Dean

Rogue Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power,

and the Search for a Left Governmentality

O ur present is not lacking in novel and alarming

characteristics and diagnoses: of a post-truth poli-
tics and the spread of fake news; of the dark arts
of the internet; of populism as movement, poli-
tics, and incompetent policy; of explicitly illiberal
democracies and regimes; of collusions and med-
dling in high politics; of antiglobalism, trade wars,
and the making and remaking of state enemies
such as Russia. It would be tempting to imagine
that this present is a time like no other, a hinge
moment of epochal significance. Above all, it would
be easy, and all too careless, to imagine that liberal
democracies, and the neoliberalism that has played
a major part in public governance for the last forty
years, have made a sudden and unexpected author-
itarian lurch.
What follows are two intertwined stories
concerning neoliberalism and its authoritarian
dimension. One is conceptual and theoretical and
concerns a small domain of academic and intellec-
tual activity: that of Michel Foucault, his influence
in what has been called “governmentality studies”
(Sennelart 2007: 390), and this field’s status in a
present in which there has been a belated redis-
covery of the political. The second is the story of a
different scale: of frameworks of governing and

The South Atlantic Quarterly 118:2, April 2019

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 326 The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2019

politics in contemporary liberal democracies, with a particular emphasis on

the extent to which these forms of governing have been liberal, in the sense
that they operate primarily in relation to the freedom of the governed and
only occasionally resort to measures that are coercive or illiberal. At stake in
the latter is the question of sovereign power, the nation, the state, and the
territory. For some time, we have been exercised with the irrationality of the
rationalities of neoliberal government. Today we are forced to turn to the
rationality of irrational neoliberal politics.
These stories are linked in that the former, concerning governmental-
ity studies and their aftermath, has been one influential way of understand-
ing the latter, the actuality of forms of governing in contemporary liberal
democracies. But it is also possible that the governmentality studies that pro-
posed to study the rationalities by which rule takes place in these societies
were not entirely immunized against features of such rationality and are
thus hampered in their express aim to find a nonnormative mode of analysis
of rationalities and technologies of liberal, and neoliberal, government. My
thesis is that the current conjuncture can be understood as a result of two
contingent events: the failure of what Daniel Zamora (2017) has called the
search for a “left governmentality,” and the transformation of the basis of
legitimacy from rational public opinion fostered in the mass media to the
evanescent and volatile fluctuations of public mood as revealed by social
media, with a concomitant renewal of the public assembly (Dean 2017). Both
public assembly and social media enact political liturgy or “liturgical power,”
as Nicholas Heron (2018) has called it.
The story is told through three snapshots, or three “presents,” as the
Foucauldian critical historian would say: that of the late 1970s, when Fou-
cault delivered his now famous lectures on the subject, but prior to neolib-
eralism entering the mainstream of public policy in liberal democracies;
the high period of governmentality studies, also the period of the adoption
of neoliberal technologies by the labor and social-democratic parties of the
1980s and 1990s; and that of today, when Foucauldian perspectives have
moved into full-blown scholasticism and academicism, but with a particu-
lar kind of legacy in the humanities and social sciences, and when multiple
forms of neoliberalism persist despite the injury to their credibility of the
previous decade’s financial crisis and the rise of political movements—
most often of the Right—explicitly targeting its neglect, abandonment, and
depredations.
This is a rogue neoliberalism, unanchored from the bases of its own
legitimacy by financial crisis, inequality, and rapacity, but somehow drawing

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 327

upon a well of deep theological resources. In its wake, it has unmoored its
own various Center-Left, cosmopolitan, and globalist manifestations. It can
reside both in the authoritarian resacralization of the market and national
economy and the purification of the nation itself from foreign, ethnic, and
racial contaminants, and also in the libertarian “lifestyle politics” that claims
to oppose it, and the pieties of the “rule of law” liberalism that seeks to keep
it in check. In terms of cultural diagnostic and imagery, the Weberian “soul-
nessness” of the Fordist industrial welfare state has been replaced by a low-
level confessional civil war between progressivist and fundamentalist neo-
liberalisms, from which the political Left has largely absented itself. At the
same time, a surplus of both political acclamation and capital accumulation
is produced by social media companies, leading to a new kind of liturgical
power that can be acted on, manipulated, and controlled with the same ruth-
lessness that an earlier generation of spin doctors sought to act on the public
opinion produced in the mass media. The manufacture of contempt has
replaced the manufacture of consent.1

The Seventies: Coming Down

In June 1975, Foucault took LSD with two younger men at Zabriskie Point
in Death Valley, California (Miller 1993: 245–84). At that time, and during
the next few years, he would also experiment with the sadomasochism
(S&M) practices of the clubs of San Francisco. While it would be purely
speculative to draw a direct correlation between the test or “ordeal” (l’épreuve)
of intense pleasures and the course of his work, the work that followed
marked a much more affirmative attention to subjectivity, and to the politi-
cal possibilities of radical self-creation and self-invention, than had been
found in his earlier writings.
In these experiments with limits and transgression, with pleasure,
truth, and subjectivity, Foucault was certainly not alone. The mid-1970s
were in many ways transitional years, from the more explicitly political col-
lective actions, often with a revolutionary intent, that had followed May 1968
and the anti–Vietnam War protests to a different kind of rebellion, concerned
with self-stylization, with the assertion of the rights of groups engaged in
such practices, and a movement away from what Foucault himself would
have regarded as the old-style revolutionary project. Like similar challenges
to the formal political spectrum, these cultural transformations had among
their conditions the end of the postwar settlement and the Long Boom, the
emergence of “stagflation,” the resultant problematization of Keynesian

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macroeconomic policy, and the reemergence of mass unemployment, partic-

ularly among the young.
At the same time, what would become the most influential political-
intellectual movement, or “thought collective” (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009),
was—not before conducting its own, very different, experiments in Latin
America and particularly with the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile (Fischer
2009)—preparing to move out of the shadows and shape the policy prescrip-
tions of liberal democracies. The most exemplary, but not the only cases (wit-
ness New Zealand), were the Margaret Thatcher government in the United
Kingdom and the Ronald Reagan administration in the United States. The
explicit focus of this movement, a distributed network with a key node at the
University of Chicago, was not the intensification of experience and the
capacities for autonomous self-sculpture against the stifling normalization
of the disciplinary state, but the limitation of the welfare state by various
forms of market liberalization and the unleashing or extension of new kinds
of freedom of choice. In this sense, while not becoming widely available for
another two decades, Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and liberalism
in 1978 and 1979 are pivotal in that they lie at the intersection of this new
concern for experimental self-creation with the recognition of the central
significance of this emergent neoliberal movement.
Foucault (2008) framed neoliberalism within his idea of “governmen-
tality” as a rationality of government, the latter understood as all the differ-
ent ways in which human conduct would be tethered by various means (or
“technologies”) to specific ends with uncertain effectivity and results. Neo-
liberalism was not to be understood as the philosophy or ideology of the lat-
est phase of capitalism but as the most recent iteration of a liberal art of gov-
ernment, that is, a critique, a method, or test (again, the keyword is l’épreuve)
of how we are governed, of whether we are governing too much, of who or
what is governing, especially the state (e.g., Foucault 2008: 317–25). Foucault
focused on the statecraft embodied by neoliberalism rather than regarding it
principally as a philosophy that somehow has implications for the form of
governing by the state. Avant la lettre, he produced the first account of neo-
liberalism as a thought collective, and in particular offered his audience
expositions of the nature of and differences between German ordoliberalism
and American Chicago School neoliberalism.
Whatever we think of the as yet unresolved controversy of Foucault’s
own relation to neoliberalism (Zamora and Behrent 2016), his perspicacious
analysis of it draws out several themes that are relevant to our understanding
of the relation between neoliberalism and a supposed authoritarian turn.

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 329

First, Foucault notes that neoliberalism seeks actively to construct forms of

freedom rather than assume it to be a natural feature of unconstrained indi-
viduals pursuing their interests in the market, as it had in more classical
forms of economic liberalism such as that of Adam Smith. Second, the mar-
ket itself is denaturalized, so that its construction becomes the principle of
legitimation of the state, and only so under definite legal and political condi-
tions, as in the case of the ordoliberals, or a technique by which formerly
public services and policy domains could be reconstructed—for example,
drug policy or the entire field of crime and justice—as in the Chicago School.
Neoliberalism is less a rollback of the state, although at times it takes on
such a character, and more a mode of “veridiction” (truth-telling) for an
art of government (Foucault 2008: 32). Government is not simply reduced to
a market or economic rationality but it enters into a tête-à-tête with it. The
market is a form of the manifestation of truth, and special authority thus
goes to its truth-tellers, the economists.
Third, neoliberalism for Foucault presents a new understanding of
subjectivity. Unlike the disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power he had
earlier analyzed, it no longer sought to “make up people” through the nor-
malizing techniques of the human sciences. Previous health, welfare, and
education systems sought to produce particular kinds of subjects. Domina-
tion had not proceeded by the objectification of what was truly human, as the
Frankfurt School had contended, but by the creation of a certain kind of
subject—docile, useful, and self-responsible. Social work, criminal anthro-
pology, and child psychology, among the other disciplines of the human sci-
ences, had conspired in the production of the “modern soul.” Neoliberalism,
in direct contrast, would move to the side of the subject and its choices and
seek to govern conduct not by the oppressive imposition of subjectivities (the
criminal, the recidivist, the homosexual, the underclass, etc.) but by acting
on the conditions of choice, with the minimal supposition that choice was
simply a nonrandom phenomenon. It would proceed by changing the rules
of the game rather than supervening upon the individual. Neoliberalism
didn’t so much aim to produce subjects as to cultivate desirable attributes of
enterprise and competition by acting on the environment of individuals and
their field of choice.
In this respect, for Foucault, neoliberalism, at least as an ideal or a
political imaginary, marked a rupture with earlier forms of power that he
had analyzed and which had come to be embodied in the institutional and
juridical structures of the modern welfare state. It was, at least in its utopian
manifestation, a way of governing that tolerated differences and was open to

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diversity, that offered support to the emerging minority groups who sought
to maximize autonomy in their own self-definition and self-creation and
resist the subjection of the welfare state and human sciences.
This is not to say that Foucault saw no dangers in neoliberalism, chief
among them the manipulation of choice by environmental interventions,
but these should be weighed against the considerable potentials he found in
it. However, in expressing the view that the Left would have to draw on liber-
alism to constitute an art of government, and that there was no equivalent in
the socialist political canon, Foucault set the course for what might be called
the search for a left governmentality. At the same time, the most famous
names of the neoliberal thought collective were enunciating the principles of
neoliberalism’s relation to authoritarianism in the context of their involve-
ment in the Pinochet regime. Friedrich Hayek (1981) seemed to surprise
himself in an interview in Santiago when he found himself preferring a “lib-
eral dictator” to a “democracy lacking liberalism,” and arguing that some-
times “democracy needs the broom of strong government.” More concisely,
for neoliberals such as Hayek and Milton Friedman, liberalism and democ-
racy were not the same thing; the opposite of liberalism was not authoritari-
anism but totalitarianism, and authoritarianism could thereby serve true
liberalism. In contrast to the supposition of a recent authoritarian turn, in
this period neoliberalism as an intellectual and political project was already
prepared to sacrifice, at least temporarily, democratic procedures and rights
for an authoritarian state willing to implement the conditions for a “free
market.” In this respect, it had learned the lessons of a “commissarial dicta-
torship” that Carl Schmitt (2014) had identified just after World War I.

Searching for a Left Governmentality

By the early 1990s neoliberalism had become a dominant project of public
governance in the Anglophone world and certainly a vigorous challenger to
the previous “path dependencies” (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010) of the
Nordic social-democratic welfare states and Western European forms of cor-
poratism. It was exported, welcomed, or violently imposed in many parts of
the world from Latin America to the former Soviet Union. After the first
decade of forms of neoliberalism that emphasized the mechanisms of the
rollback of the state through privatizations of state organizations, fiscal aus-
terity, and anti-inflationary monetary policies, the Left or what styled itself as
the Center Left began to search out what lessons it could learn from neolib-
eralism. By the mid-1990s, it was labor and social-democratic parties, at

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 331

least in the Anglophone world, and international organizations such as the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that
would be instrumental in carrying out a comprehensive reform of institu-
tions and institutional practices, particularly in regard to welfare, social
security, health care, and education, in accordance with principles of compe-
tition and enterprise, and through techniques of the recomposition of the
public sector (under the “new public management”) so that it would act
more and more like a series of “quasi-” or constructed markets. “Precarity”
was now a firmly entrenched feature of liberal democracies, and the occa-
sion for ever new cultural problematizations and “culture wars,” as well as
demands for the reformation of governmental practices under the newspeak
term welfare reform. This was a term especially associated with the Clinton-
era Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996 and with the new welfare discourse more generally (Schram 2000).
Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism had ended a month before the
signal election of the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom. In the
lectures, Foucault (2008: 92n100) had argued that there was no autono-
mous socialist governmentality, and had promised to deliver a book on the
socialist arts of government. He had made two points that are salient here
both to the course of social theory and philosophy and to the search for a left
governmentality. First, while there was no autonomous socialist governmen-
tality, it could, and, in its historical forms, did borrow from other forms of
governmentality. While the socialism of the Communist Parties had bor-
rowed from the governmental techniques of the police state and tied itself to
a “governmentality of the party” (Foucault 2008: 90–92, 191), the postwar
German Social Democrats, after the Bad Godesburg Congress of 1959, had
effectively abandoned socialist precepts and Marxist theory and embraced
the consensus of a liberal governmentality associated with the ordoliberals.
Foucault seemed to suggest a version of Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alter-
native) principle: leftist and socialist parties would be forced to decide on the
art of government available to them and that choice would be between the
dark arts of totalitarianism and the light techniques of economic liberalism.
The second point concerned the shift of the focus of politics from a
question of exploitation to one of subjectivity and the implications of this for
public policy. For Foucault, as we have seen, American neoliberalism, at
least as an ideal program, works through constructing choice, not through
the production of subjectivity, as did the pastoral-inspired welfare state (Fou-
cault 2008: 259–60). This difference is also played out on the register of
practical policies. Criminal justice will not be organized according to the

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truth of various forms of subjectivity but according to the “negative demand”

for crime and the calibration of the risks of the individual subject considered
not as a criminal, but as a rational subject of choice (255). In proposals for a
negative tax under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the question of the unemployed
person is no longer one of disciplinary, bureaucratic, or inquisitorial practice
but of the choices of the individual in a game of competition. It is up to individ-
uals whether they want to work or not, in the knowledge that they will be sure
of a minimal subsistence, saved from absolute but not relative poverty (205–7).
In an interview with the chief of a centrist trade union, Foucault began
to sketch out what this left governmentality would look like. The problem of
the welfare state has always been one of the trade-offs between security and
autonomy, but now its pathology is not simply the possibility of marginaliza-
tion from society but also the integration into the mechanisms of social
security themselves and the resulting dependency that entails (Foucault
1988: 160–65). Foucault thus suggests it is necessary to defer to what he
calls the “political, economic and political rationality of modern societies,”
namely, the policy prescriptions he learned about in his analysis of neoliber-
alism. Such a rationality chimes with his answers to these problems framed
in terms of a “way of life” and “lifestyles.” In keeping with the social move-
ments of everyday resistance to institutional, disciplinary, and patriarchal
power, he notes that rationality demands a “security that opens the way to
richer, more numerous, more diverse, and more flexible relations with one-
self and one’s environment, while guaranteeing to each individual a real
autonomy” (161). To combat welfare dependency, Foucault suggests “a pro-
cess of decentralization” that would lead to a closer relation between users of
services and “decision-making centers” (165). In short, the structural eco-
nomic problems of the fiscal crisis of the welfare state of his time were to be
met by the serendipitous conjunction of the need for a decomposition of the
social state with the new approaches to subjectivity made possible in recent
struggles. In fact, Foucault concludes, the welfare system should become a
“vast experimental field” and the “whole institutional complex, at present
very fragile, will probably have to undergo a restructuring from top to bot-
tom” (165, 166). Just as the subject would remake itself through intense
ordeals and the forms of truth they engender, the entire welfare state would
be put to the test in relation to the regime of veridiction of the market.
By the 1990s the restructuring of the welfare state from top to bottom
was a real and pressing concern. The idea of social rights of individuals was
displaced by the mutual obligation of individuals and government, in which
government would ensure, but not necessarily provide, some kind of social
provision in exchange for social beneficiaries remaking themselves in partic-

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 333

ular ways, learning to plan their own lives, combating the ill effects of their
risk of welfare dependence, undertaking training and retraining as required,
undergoing therapy and being case-managed, and learning to act more and
more like an enterprise. Key themes would include the telos of an “active soci-
ety,” with flexible and agile populations, able to grasp the changing opportu-
nities of the market, now projected onto a global scale rather than remaining
at a national one, made competitive by the investments in human capital and
the enterprise of the individuals that composed it (Dean 1995). As Foucault
foreshadowed, the individual, having been through a series of tests and
ordeals, would experience the pleasures of life as an enterprise.
While Foucault would look to Greco-Roman antiquity for an autono-
mous practice of the care of the self, other theorists of left governmentality
would find an easier route through the sociological supposition of changing
forms of subjectivity. While not using such an expression, sociological theo-
rists such as Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991) would argue
that under conditions of late modernity, the individual would no longer be
bound by the ascribed characteristics of class, race and ethnicity, and gender
and sexuality that had been transmitted by traditional, patriarchal, familial,
and religious forms of socialization. Rather, individuals were capable of
remaking themselves, with or without the help of the armies of therapists
and self-help experts; of examining the contents of their given identities,
including those of class; of challenging them and making new choices for
themselves. Individuals would be capable of narrating and renarrating their
own lives, choosing their own personal and sexual identity, and entering into
intimate relations on a new ground of equality rather than conventional patri-
archal and traditional hierarchical relations, including those of class. This
“reflexive project of the self” would at best lead to a new “cosmopolitan” iden-
tity that would be capable of understanding and empathizing with the trajec-
tory of other very diverse pathways to this reflexive identity. As class identi-
ties and solidarities loosened and lost their defining significance for identity,
the presence and impact of a class politics of mass labor parties and trade
unions would diminish and eventually disappear. The reflexive, self-making
individuals would identify with different communities and forms of political
associations around these new identifications. The importance of the auton-
omy, vibrancy, and vitality of civil society or community would be rediscov-
ered. Civil society would be the place of the experimentations made possible
by these new diverse collective identifications and would also become the
means by which the fiscal problems and bureaucratic sclerosis of the welfare
state would be attenuated, if not fully solved, and on a global scale; problems
of war, poverty, and the environment would be addressed.

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The diagnostic moment for such social theory comes when we turn to
public policy. Because the truth of the subject was changing, and the poten-
tial of a new self-making or reflexive individual was emerging in a “second
modernity,” it was no longer possible to provide governmental programs and
politics around the old solidarities of class and family. Rather than being the
recipient of a right, the individual had to become a certain type of subject,
with the help of a range of experts, but no longer under their tutelage and as
a full and equal partner; the vertical relations of state, authority, and exper-
tise were to be replaced by horizontal and reciprocal ones that enlist the sub-
ject’s own capacities, lifestyle, and forms of freedom in the process. Life had
become a “planning project.” As Giddens (1998: 36–37) put it, “We have to
make our lives in a more active way than was true of previous generations,
and we need more actively to accept responsibility for the consequences of
what we do and the life habits we adopt.” Or, even more bluntly, this from
Ulrich Beck (1992: 135): “In the individualised society, the individual must
learn, on pain of permanent disadvantage, to conceive of himself or herself
as the centre of activity, as the planning office with respect to his or her own
biography, abilities, orientations, relationships and so on.” Such was the uni-
versal lesson of this new modernity for rich and poor, for S&M-experiment-
ing philosophers and dope-smoking unemployed youth, for Cambridge
white male academics and black teenage moms alike: no longer Cuius regio,
eius religio (whose realm, his religion), but Cuius societas, eius forma vitae
(whose society, his form of life).
There is then a direct link between sociological theories of the self and
the individualization processes of late modernity and the programs of gov-
ernment that seek to elicit such self-transformational capacities from the
individual. This is the key lesson of the Third Way politics in which
Anthony—later Lord—Giddens would play the crown theorist to Tony Blair’s
New Labour. But the aporias of turning a general sociological theory of the
subject into a normative governmental one soon would multiply, with devas-
tating consequences for those who would meet the newly privatized, mar-
ketized, and individualized service provision amid the ruins of the welfare
state. One can note that the categorization of individuals according to such
individualizing capacities leads to a particular hierarchy in terms of the
degree of capability of exercising autonomy, and the emergence of multiple
categories of those “at high risk of welfare dependency,” who should be sub-
ject to a range of educational, training, and therapeutic practices to assist in
the gaining of such capabilities. Because they do not have or have yet to
develop such capacities, they need to be encouraged, enticed, and even forced

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 335

into such: hence the long deliberation on and experimentation with the rela-
tionship between libertarianism and paternalism, first with the New Pater-
nalism and later with the advocacy of a libertarian paternalism and nudge
theory. If neoliberal policy prescriptions had been revealed to be entirely com-
patible with the authoritarian and dictatorial regimes at national levels during
the 1970s and, in many instances, required them, by the 1990s it was becom-
ing clear that the neoliberal prescriptions for the shaping of choice and free-
dom were necessarily connected to the instantiation of systems of obligation
and coupled with more or less disciplinary, coercive, and sovereign instru-
ments. Among the coercive ones would be the widespread use of workfare
programs (Peck 1998), that is, make-work programs that simulated employ-
ment for social welfare beneficiaries and made participation in them condi-
tional for receiving benefits. The limits of the governmentality of the welfare
recipient are revealed by the increasing use of the removal of benefits from
the individual for failing to participate in said programs or to make enough
job applications, and the mandating of what benefits can be spent on. The net
effect of this conditionality is the deterrence of the use of social welfare by
large sections of the population, leaving them to the vagaries of the precari-
ous and minimum-wage employment market, “zero-hour” contracts, the “gig
economy,” the support of their families and friends, the empty promises of
entrepreneurship and start-ups, or, worse still, grifting and less socially
acceptable ways of eking out a living. There is little choice between the ordeals
required to remake oneself as an enterprise and the quotidian ordeals of a
deconstructed labor market. The neoliberal celebration of identity and
self-making is mired in the authoritarian practices it generates (Dean 2002).

Confessional Civil War

The cultural diagnosis appropriate to the Fordist, industrial-welfare state
was perhaps Max Weber’s (1985: 181) “iron cage,” in which the individual
was reduced to the compulsory pursuit of a career, or at least performance of
a job, within the industrial and bureaucratic divisions of labor of large corpo-
rations and government departments. The fate of modernity appeared to be
one of soulnessness and alienation. Recently, in Europe and the United
States, another trope has appeared: that of civil war. Emmanuel Macron,
president of France, has used the term to describe the relationship between
the European Union and the self-proclaimed “illiberal democracies,” such as
Viktor Orban’s Hungary and those following in its wake (Erlanger 2018).
Many commentators in the United States have taken up the theme of civil

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war. In one instance, it describes the relation between an unpredictable

authoritarian decisionism of the Trump administration that undermines the
“rule of law” and the legal protection of the autonomy of the states of the
Union (Greenhouse 2018). In this way, the cultural-political diagnostic of the
present seems much closer to Carl Schmitt’s writings in the Weimar Repub-
lic than to those of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, as a continuation of confes-
sional civil war by other means (Ulmen 1985). Indeed, after the full flush of
the alignment between liberalism and cosmopolitan globalism of the 1990s,
we have witnessed the reemergence of deadly antagonisms taking several
forms: from the civilizational clashes of Samuel Huntington, to the discovery
of nonstate enemies of humanity of the war on terror and the neoconserva-
tives at the time of George W. Bush’s administration, to the revival of state
enemies such as Russia largely by progressive liberals and the mass media.
Today, to refine the image, these antagonisms take the form of a kind of
low-intensity confessional civil war within liberal democracies themselves.
On occasion, the latter manifests itself in the speeches of politicians
during the hurly-burly of political campaigns. In the United States, a finance-
friendly progressivist neoliberalism has fought the alliance of a literally
armed white working class with Christian fundamentalists and evangeli-
cals. Before Hillary Clinton’s characterization at an “LGBTQ gala” fund-
raiser of half of Trump’s supporters as being in “a basket of deplorables” who
are also, with a more theologically resonant accent, “irredeemable,” there
was then senator Obama’s 2008 view of the white working class who, due
to economic hardship, had become bitter and clung “to guns and religion”
(Chozick 2016). In Europe during the debt crisis, the confessional civil war
takes place between the Protestant Northwest and its institutions, such as
the ordoliberal-inspired European Union, the European Central Bank, and
the German government and its Finance Ministry, and the Orthodox and
Catholic South and East, who, according to the former, would lack the “solid-
ity” of character and the regularized and self-responsible life conduct
required for necessary European “solidarity” (Hien 2017).
One does not have to accede to Macron’s diagnosis to grant that civil
war acts as an effective political imaginary in the present. From his perspec-
tive, there is an identity between liberalism and democracy, making both an
illiberal democracy and a despotic liberalism contradictions in terms. It thus
suppresses the different scales of the relationship between neoliberal rule
and authoritarianism: whether concerning the regimes of the government of
national states and the international order or of the techniques of manage-
ment of various populations and individuals, as we have seen above. On the
other hand, this perspective fails to recognize how much of the neoliberal

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 337

political and policy agenda is being implemented by that which it posits as its
opposite. Rather than two opposed ideologies and contrasting worldviews,
such as the Cold War binary between communism and capitalism, progres-
sive, financial neoliberalism finds a distorted version of itself in its Other. The
nativist expulsion from the body of the nation of undesirable populations is
tightly coupled with the expulsion from the market of unnecessary regula-
tion. Populism clings like mud shaped by neoliberalism’s antistatist and anti-
bureaucracy tire tracks: from the “drain the swamp” variety in the United
States to Matteo Salvini’s characterization of his prime ministerial designate
as an “expert in simplification and de-bureaucratization” (Horowitz 2018).
So what has happened? Neoliberalism as a thought collective and path
dependency has largely succeeded in the economic “neutralization” of the
political. The failure of the search for a left governmentality, or the adoption
by Center-Left parties of neoliberal technologies of government, together
with a widespread intellectual antistatism and rejection of formal politics, has
deprived or at least undermined labor and social-democratic parties’ organic
concerns with the conditions of the working and precarious populations, leav-
ing little effective voice of discontent other than antiglobalist appeals to a
“walled sovereignty” (Brown 2010). Instead, as exemplified by the Hillary
Clinton campaign in 2016, the Center Left becomes—or at least can be read-
ily portrayed by its opponents as—the party of diversity disconnected from
fundamental concerns around economic exploitation, widening inequality,
and narrowing life chances for a sizable segment of its traditional constitu-
ents. This means that there is an opportunity to articulate economic griev-
ance and disappointment with an attack on the cultural as well as economic
“elites” of contemporary capitalism. It is also possible to articulate a possible
identity politics for those left out of it. Thus, groups that include many who
would be conventionally defined through ascribed characteristics as white,
male, and working class demand to be heard not in terms of their class posi-
tion but as yet another identity group with specific interests, needs, and
rights. Isn’t gun owning simply another lifestyle for people in rural areas? In
an age where sexual minorities are encouraged to assert their rights, what
about the ordeals of involuntarily celibate men, as the “incels” violently assert?
At the same time, the kind of developments that undermined the
Fordist system of industrial production and the welfare state have utterly
transformed the previous hegemony of the capitalist media corporations and
the form of public sphere and public narratives they sustained. Social media,
and the forms of participation it has engendered, not only multiply sources
of knowledge and opinion and increased opportunities for political participa-
tion and identification, but they also unravel the regimes of truth character-

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 338 The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2019

istic of the mass media (Dean 2017). The “objective” voice of the narration
formed through the mass media is displaced by the more volatile swings of
the public mood registered and almost immediately legible on social media,
and the tribal truths of those who make specific identifications through
social media. The latter, of course, becomes a new domain of political manip-
ulation and control, much to the surprise of the peddlers of liberal teleolo-
gies of the progressive expansion of civil society. Yet the relations of power
and possibilities of manipulation run much deeper than the surveillance
society with its increased digital panopticism and even algorithmic govern-
mentality can allow. While there is much talk of a “politics of untruth” or of
“post-truth politics,” we can say that the mass media, like science, has lost its
monopoly on truth. Indeed, the demand for regulation of social media in the
name of individual privacy, and the protests in the defense of science, can be
understood as belated and parallel attempts by the mass media and institu-
tionalized science to reclaim their monopolies on certain manifestations of
truth. What is paradoxical is that those who once might have criticized the
first as purveyors of ideology and the other as reductionist and positivist can
now find themselves aligned with both.
When the alt-Right emerged as an actor in the 2016 US election, it may
have appeared as little more than white supremacism mixed with wounded
masculine aggression (Green 2017). However, at least publicly, it succeeded in
representing itself as a conjunction of social media savvy with the appropria-
tion of identity politics on behalf of the “forgotten” populations laid to waste
by global capitalist competition and the deconstructed welfare state. It demon-
strates the capacity to extend the political manipulation of the public sphere
from the dispositive of public opinion associated with the mass media to the
dispositive of the “public mood” formed through social media (Dean 2017).
While it is easy, and somewhat facile, to regard this latter shift as a seismic
catastrophe for liberal democracy, one could argue that it was founded on an
extension of one of the oldest elements of direct forms of democracy: accla-
mation, the shouts and cries accompanied by hand gestures and flag waving,
that were at the core of both the liturgical power (Heron 2018) of the Chris-
tian church and the mass identifications of authoritarian and direct democra-
cies. The acclamations of the public assembly, which had been displaced by
the kind of acclamation produced by the corporate mass media, was now
renewed, not least by the Trump campaign itself, in tandem with the likes,
posts, and “friending” of social media. The latter, which had been the basis of
the business model of social media platforms in their use of “digital market-
ing,” found its way into the marketing of political candidates. Insofar as both
populist politics and social media posts are versions of acclamatory will and

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 339

affect, they share a previously unacknowledged affinity. While the Trump

campaign exemplified the links between the acclamations of the political
rally and those of social media (Dean 2018a), it is not without note that both
parties in Italy’s populist government of 2018 were adept in social media
mobilization, with Five Star beginning as a digital movement. The scandals
(e.g., regarding Cambridge Analytica and the use of Facebook profiles) that
have ensued are nothing more than surface ripples of a deeper break in the
transformation of the form of political acclamation that has provided legiti-
mation within liberal democracies. Political acclamation has gone viral. It has
jumped not only platforms, but also forms of media, and kinds of social and
political collectivity.
It is remarkable that the shift in liberal-democratic politics is articu-
lated in a similar fashion to the rollback phase of neoliberalism of the 1980s.
Deregulation occurs in relation to environmental and financial areas (on the
latter, witness the fate of Dodd-Frank). There is the abandonment of interna-
tional agreements that impose regulatory standards and frameworks, for
example, the Paris Accords on climate. For the first time in a quarter century,
there is a disarticulation with globalism, manifest in the withdrawal or threat-
ened withdrawal from international trade agreements and pacts, or the
demand for renegotiation of their terms. Given the success of the Left take-
over of neoliberal forms of governmentality, the response is less a form of
governmentality than an antigovernmentality, a search for a return to a pure
and virtuous market or national economy, no longer tethered by governmen-
tal regulation. In an Executive Order of April 10, 2018, “welfare reform” has
become equivalent to enforcing a requirement of work for those seeking
assistance of any kind, thus strengthening the “purgatorial ethic” that has
animated it (Boland and Griffin 2017). In the demand for a removal of those
vestiges of the welfare state that distort human virtue and proper conduct,
there are deep layers of differential treatment of populations according to race
and place. Nevertheless, the governmentality of the activation machine may
prove as dispensable in the Trump era as the Art Deco friezes of his first
Manhattan building project.
One should not underestimate how attitudes and most importantly
affects toward race, migration, and Muslims, played a significant role in the
electoral behavior of white voters in the United States. However, a key ques-
tion remains unanswered. It concerns how such attitudes and affects are
mobilized and manipulated today. Here the need for rethinking the forma-
tion of the public sphere and the role of social and digital media is apparent,
as too is the need for asking hard questions about the nature of political iden-
tification and the form that political acclamation takes today. The assertion

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 340 The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2019

of the presence of a new sphere of political manipulability is something to

be explained, rather than the explanation it often claims to be. If at the core
of these political identifications are affects such as resentment and anger
toward others, then how have these resentments become central to large
numbers of people’s political behavior? While we should not ignore the
complex history of racial and ethnic domination and exclusion in formerly
colonial powers and current imperial ones, the neoliberal erosion of the
welfare state and its transformation into a sphere akin to purgatory for
social welfare recipients intensifies the personal experience of precarity, the
resentment of those who must have recourse to it, and the vilification of
those who have no other option.
Contemporary neoliberalism is rogue in the sense that it has lost its
identification with a unified political movement providing it some kind of
legitimacy. Broadly, it first entered the public political domain in the guise of
a conservatism during its rollback phase, and then turned to labor and social
democratic parties during its rollout, or implementation phase. Today, a
rogue neoliberalism belongs to no one side and attaches itself to diverse polit-
ical and economic formations: fundamentalist Christians and diversity advo-
cates, finance and real-estate capital, progressive liberals and conservative
authoritarians, sovereign decisionism and the rule of law. Antibureaucratic
advocacy for businesses, the belief in market-based solutions, even for climate
change, the vociferous boosterism of entrepreneurship and innovation, and
the mantra of individual responsibility and self-help are shared across pro-
gressive and reactive neoliberalism. With a few noble exceptions, the Left has
dealt itself out of the political game or joined on the side of the progressivist
neoliberalism. If there is a civil war, it is, like the conflict between various
kinds of Catholics and Protestants four centuries ago, not a war between dif-
ferent religions but different confessions of the same religion. Neoliberalism,
which sought an economic neutralization of the political through the recon-
struction of the state and the public domain as a set of markets that have no
other legitimacy than an economic one, has displaced the political onto the
domain of affective identity and identification: diverse and inclusive, on the
one hand, and supremacist and nativist, on the other. The opportunities for
the expression and participation in such a form of politics have multiplied
with the internet; the key mechanisms of identification are the acclamations
(and narcissistic self-acclamations) that define social media. Neoliberalism
has become a series of rogue affects, of tribal identifications formed through
the ordeals and tests that mark, tattoo, mold, and dress bodies in the plea-
sures of the enterprise, paraded in its different paradigms by a series of fam-
ilies: the Trumps, the Obamas, the Macrons, the Kardashians.

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 Dean • Neoliberalism, Liturgical Power, and the Search for a Left Governmentality 341

The present moment is crucial for the humanities and social sciences,
undergoing their own transformations that have reconstructed the univer-
sity space of research and teaching as one of competition and performance.
They have the tools, the methods, the heritage, and the historical sense to
make the present intelligible. However, they are hampered by inherited and
now quite dominant critical traditions following poststructuralism and the
immanent turn that have, among other things, reduced the political to a
debate over forms of governance, displayed and encouraged an analytical
antistatism, and absolutely neglected the problem of the formation of publics
through the acclamations, ceremonies, protocols, and liturgies of politics and
political communication. One of the ways out of these analytical shortcom-
ings has, for the past few years at least, required the radical problematizations
made available by first a political, and then an economic theology (Dean
2018b). In the latter, we find the broadest and most compelling attempt to
rethink, using the history of not only discourses of civil government but also
those of divine government, the relationship between the mundane gover-
nance and economic management of life and the sovereign power that is
constituted as its foundation and source of authority.

Notes
As is clear from the text, the title of this essay is indebted to the theoretical work, of very
different kinds, conducted by Nicholas Heron and Daniel Zamora.
1. I owe the former phrase to a personal communication I had with Ian Hunter.

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