Ending Neoliberalism

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new round of obituaries for neoliberalism, with some declaring that we have entered the stage of “postneoliberalism.” Rather than weighing in on the debates about whether neoliberalism has or has not ended, this article reflects on the theoretical framework in which neoliberalism's end has come to be posited. The article calls this framework “ending,” which allows the theorist to make “imaginative investments in coherent patterns” (Frank Kermode) with beginnings, middles, and ends. By drawing on Kermode's literary theory, the article lays out three key features of ending as a theoretical framework: a teleological vision of history; a Euro- and Anglocentric view of neoliberalism; and a distinction between a neoliberal policy paradigm and modes of subjectification. The article then goes on to explore the political limitations of ending, especially for the left, through a reading of Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). To finish, the article seeks to resurrect ending as a metatheoretical device in which ending as a framework becomes the subject of theorization. Doing so, the article proposes, helps the left to reflect on the position from which it analyzes neoliberalism, as well as to better connect such reflection to concrete political projects that seek to actively end neoliberalism.

Is neoliberalism in a persistent state of ending? It seems that way. Since the 1990s, there have been regular claims of its demise, whether it was the election of Bill Clinton, the Pink Tide in Latin America, the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing Eurozone debt crisis, the election of Donald Trump and other authoritarian figures, or Brexit.¹ A few years after each event that has supposedly signaled its end, several theorists and commentators have respond by analyzing the “strange non-death” of neoliberalism.² We start to wonder: Is neoliberalism a zombie?³ No, perhaps it is a mutant?⁴ Or is it Frankenstein's monster?⁵

In 2019, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore wrote a piece titled “Still Neoliberalism?” in South Atlantic Quarterly, which served as the introduction to a special issue on neoliberalism in the context of the mid-decade authoritarian turn in global politics.⁶ But the question they posed, we can note with the benefit of retrospection, anticipated the emerging trend in critical accounts of neoliberalism, both in academic and more public-facing literature. Across diverse disciplines, from the more established domains of critical literature on neoliberalism in political economy, political and critical theory, and history, to case studies in sociology, education, and geography, several scholars saw the wave of authoritarian politics, and the rise of populism more generally, as signaling neoliberalism's end.⁷ A year later, as COVID-19 gripped the globe, the shutting down of fundamental vectors of the global economy, coupled with the aforementioned authoritarian turn, accelerated the academic literature around neoliberalism's end.⁸ And alongside this academic literature, a flurry of public-facing think pieces have also questioned whether this is “still neoliberalism.” Since 2020, for instance, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New Statesman, New York Magazine, and Foreign Policy, to name but a few prominent Anglophone and mostly liberal outlets, have all published articles on whether neoliberalism is ending or has come to an end.⁹ Several podcast and radio shows have been dedicated to analyzing neoliberalism's end.¹⁰ Even bastions of Anglophone neoliberal orthodoxy, like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, have dared to ponder, if tentatively, whether neoliberalism's heyday is over.¹¹

If the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic saw the return of isolationist and competitive geopolitics—escalating, as it stands—then the kinds of state intervention necessitated by the pandemic appeared to signal the demise of domestic neoliberal policymaking across the Global North. Cédric Durand concluded, when discussing the Biden administration's 2021 relief package, that its “logic [was] distinct from any kind of neoliberal policy.”¹² Others, such as Will Davies and Nicholas Gane, claim we are witnessing the rise of “post-neoliberalism,” which speaks to “a set of emergent rationalities, critiques, movements and reforms that take root in neoliberal societies and begin to weaken or transform key tenets of neoliberal reason and politics.”¹³ The Hewlett Foundation—a nonpartisan charitable trust established by the cofounder of the Hewlett-Packard—has committed US$50 million to “help develop a new intellectual paradigm to replace neoliberalism.”¹⁴ Neoliberalism, as we have known it, appears to be ending.

We might ask, however, what is this neoliberalism we have known? Without repeating the debates over the usefulness of neoliberalism as a term, readers of this article will no doubt be aware that neoliberalism is difficult to pin down, sometimes understood as a policy or intellectual paradigm, a political rationality, a class-based political project, a process of subjectification, the marketization of every sphere of life, or various combinations of these phenomena. For some, neoliberalism is a redundant or limited term, describing nothing and everything at the same time.¹⁵ And yet the evasiveness of neoliberalism as a concept has not stopped regular declarations of its end. From recent death notices in the midst of the pandemic, a shifting policy paradigm seems be the main symptom of neoliberalism's end.

But we might retort that neoliberalism has always revealed itself to be flexible in the realm of policy, much more than many critics acknowledge. Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe have made the point that “neoliberalism is less a policy orthodoxy than a consistent approach to policy problems,” in which “neoliberals are avowed interventionists of their own kind, rethinking policies according to context and showing both a capacity for improvisation and an attitude of flexible response.”¹⁶ Furthermore, as Brett Christophers has noted, marketization “was only ever one part of neoliberalism,” and as one of “several vectors of ‘neoliberalization,’ it has often been the most limited.” In fact, Christophers argues, “governments across the neoliberal world have remained much more active and interventionist in matters such as price-setting and the channelling of investment than is commonly supposed.”¹⁷ The question of neoliberalism's end, therefore, is about not so much what we are moving away from but what we are moving toward. We might well be moving toward something that is not what we understand as neoliberalism, but if the history of neoliberalism tells us anything, it is that simply moving away from past orthodoxy does not signify its end.

Maybe we could argue that we are witnessing the end of a version of neoliberal global hegemony. But a hegemonic ending is not the same as a total or epochal ending. Stuart Hall reminds us that while neoliberalism constitutes a “hegemonic project,” hegemony is a “tricky concept,” because it is “a process, not a state of being. No victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has constantly to be ‘worked on,’ maintained, renewed, revised.”¹⁸ There is no doubt that the dynamics of neoliberal hegemony are shifting, that there are “a set of emergent rationalities, critiques, movements and reforms” that do not reflect the hegemonic project that we have known. But, as Hall notes, “no project achieves ‘hegemony’ as a completed project.”¹⁹ Neoliberalism as an intellectual project, a political rationality, a process of subjectification, exceeds the confines of neoliberal hegemony. Previous erroneous obituaries should remind us to keep this distinction between neoliberalism and neoliberal hegemony in mind. We must always have an eye on what is being “maintained, renewed, revised.”

Regardless of where one stands on these debates, time will tell whether we are witnessing the end of neoliberalism or not. But an important concern arises from these debates on the very framework in which neoliberalism's end is critically analyzed, a framework that I call “ending.” By “ending,” I refer to the taking up of a particular theoretical position in the face of neoliberalism, one that allows the theorist to map a coherent narrative with beginnings, middles, and ends. It is important to clarify that while “ending” has crossovers with the idea of “endism,” a term that has been used to describe historiographical debates around the “end of history,” I am not rehearsing a debate between Marxist and neo-Hegelian historicism.²⁰ Instead, I insist on the gerund ending to denote a recurring and evolving process rather than a schematic that can be universally applied.

Specifically, I am interested in the political limitations of this framework. Given the majority of obituaries for neoliberalism come from the left, I want to ask: Does the framework of ending reveal something about the position from which the left encounters neoliberalism? To echo Phillip Mirowski, why does the left have such a “termination fascination” with neoliberalism?²¹ The “left” here is used to refer to those thinkers interested in both critiquing neoliberalism and elaborating alternatives to neoliberalism and/or capitalism. A broad definition of the left is necessary given the diversity of the disciplines and schools of thought—such as Marxism, post-Marxism, critical theory, political theory, international political economy, public economics, intellectual history—that have engaged in theorizing neoliberalism's end. In fact, although it is ultimately beyond the scope of this article, it is worth questioning how and why these different and often conflicting disciplinary approaches and schools of thought have each come to theorize neoliberalism's end in some shape or form. Perhaps this phenomenon reflects the polysemic aspect of neoliberalism as a concept, in that it can be shaped into whatever each school of thought requires, but perhaps it also implies a critical impasse on the contemporary left more generally, a sense that ending is something that happens to neoliberalism and not something that the left does to it. This article works toward understanding this latter possibility.

To outline what I mean by ending as a theoretical framework, I draw initially on Frank Kermode's famous work of literary theory, The Sense of an Ending (1967). With Kermode, I contend that ending is an important critical tool as it allows us to build narratives and to create order out of flux. But the desire for the clarity revealed by ending can also lead theorists to make what Kermode calls “imaginative investments in coherent patterns.”²² Such “imaginative investments” have been rife throughout the literature that has declared the death of neoliberalism, and they manifest themselves in three key features of ending: a teleological vision of history; a Euro- and Anglocentric view of neoliberalism; and a distinction between a neoliberal policy paradigm and modes of subjectification. Certainly, each of these three features is not found in all the literature on neoliberalism's end, but rather these three features are my attempt to synthesize and theorize the political limitations of the literature invested in ending as a framework. I then turn to Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022)—a book that employs a version of ending as its primary theoretical framework. I am not suggesting that Gerstle's book is representative of all of the literature on neoliberalism's end, nor that it contains all the features of ending outlined above. Instead, a critical reading of Gerstle's use of ending as a framework allows us to theorize the political limitations of preoccupations with endings. As a counter to this narrative of ending, in the conclusion I resurrect a version of ending by reflecting on the respective ways in which the contemporary left and (far) right have reacted to various postcrisis mutations of neoliberalism. Here, I outline the potential of employing ending as a metatheoretical device that enables theorists to reflect on the conditions under which they have come to posit neoliberalism's end so as not to fall into the recurring cycle of declaring its end and then wrestling with its subsequent endurance. Doing so, I argue, keeps open multiple potential “ends” of neoliberalism in ways that can be politically fruitful for the left by connecting a theory of ending with a concrete politics that seeks to end neoliberalism.

“Imaginative Investments” in Neoliberalism's End

The making of historical narratives is at one with the construction of endings; as critical thinkers, ending enables us to periodize, reflect on epochs, and imagine what is to come. Amid the various political, economic, and social crises of the 1970s, for example, Keynesianism had an ending, which overlapped with the beginning of neoliberalism. This is the basic and broadly accepted historical narrative that has been helpful in allowing us to map the contours of a shifting political economy, one that has radically transformed not only economic and political policy in the last four decades but everyday life.

But we also know that history is never quite as neat and tidy as we would like it to be; the break from Keynesianism to neoliberalism is one instance.²³ In some ways, it was this leakiness between beginnings and ends that Raymond Williams grappled with through the concept of “structures of feeling.” He argued:

Inspired by Gramsci, and anticipating Hall's work on hegemony, Williams attempts here to hold true to a Marxist teleological version of history, which requires the passing through stages of development that must have begun and ended, while resisting the tendency to reduce human life to a logical process of history. The assumption that certain processes have “ended,” as Williams puts it, is essential to understanding the relationship between “institutions, formations, and experiences,” which enables us to produce narratives about their interrelations. But, at the same time, viewing these things through the lens of their ending also means that “living presence” recedes from the viewpoint of the narrative, and what we end up discussing is a fossilized version of the world, one in which “formed wholes” present themselves as finished and fully formed processes.

Kermode explores a similar theme to Williams in his seminal work of literary theory The Sense of an Ending, although with a less explicitly Marxist bent. In here, Kermode charts our fascination and deep discomfort with the idea of what he calls “the End.” We are engrossed with the End because we are always in the midst, always somewhere between a beginning and an end. We create historical epochs, he argues, because “it reflects our deep need for intelligible Ends.” He goes on: “We project ourselves—a small, humble elect, perhaps—past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.”²⁵ But the End itself is nothing more than a construct. We always find ourselves in the middle, and as a result, we “can of course arrange for the End to occur at pretty well any desired date.”²⁶ This is not to criticize our desire for ends or to suggest that we should just live in the midst and get on with it. Ends are a feature of how we make sense of the world. On the left, we are of course familiar with the eschatological mantra, often attributed to Fredric Jameson, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We are simultaneously driven by and at the mercy of the End.

Kermode goes on to summarize what he thinks lies behind our need for the End:

In the End, coherence lies. And in coherence, we can make sense of things by giving them a beginning and an end. But as Kermode points out, when we are “awake and sane,” we always find ourselves in the midst and thus must “show a marked respect for things as they are.” This call for careful consideration of what currently exists leads Kermode to a famous formulation: “No longer imminent, the End is immanent.”²⁸ The End becomes part of the middle. It is not something that the middle will become but rather something that shapes how we experience the middle.

It is worth noting here that Kermode evaluates his theory of the End through a reading of various literary narratives rather than an analysis of political or historical actions and events. Kermode alludes to this distinction in the opening lines of the book: “It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.”²⁹ The literary theorist, Kermode implies, sits to the side of the concrete conditions of life. From this vantage point, the theorist does not directly apply their ideas to the world constructed in the literary form but instead seeks to understand how authors and critics come to have their ideas about that world. I am making a similar move to Kermode in this article. For in The Sense of an Ending, Kermode does not apply his theory of the End to a direct reading of literature but rather seeks to find in “eschatological fictions” ways of thinking through the End that have consequences for our understanding of real historical and political actions and events. My argument is that we can do the same with the critical literature on neoliberalism's end—the technique need not be limited to literary forms. Most crucially, Kermode's theory of ending enables us to consider the psychic attachment to coherence for any kind of narrative that works toward the End, which, as I have noted above, is prevalent in the critical literature around neoliberalism. I am thus attempting the “feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense” of neoliberalism's end. In other words, I am thinking about how a literary theory like Kermode's might help us think differently about the ways in which we approach the real historical and political events of neoliberalism. Where Kermode finds both overt and subtle conceptions of the End at work in literary forms, I can also see conceptions of the End operating in the critical literature on neoliberalism's end.

With Kermode in mind, we might ask: Have some of us on the left made “imaginative investments in coherent patterns” when it comes to neoliberalism's end? Previous declarations of neoliberalism's end, and its subsequent nondeath, suggest as much. We have justifiably had it up to here with neoliberalism, and so we want the End to be imminent and not immanent. Perhaps in desiring an end to neoliberalism, we want to will the End into existence to bring about a “satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle.” But when “awake and sane,” how do we attend to things as they really are?

Features of Ending

Imaginative investments in the end of neoliberalism take the form of three broad features of ending, which manifest themselves variously in the literature I have cited above. One is to see neoliberalism as a static and coherent set of ideas and policies, and thus when world events seem to necessitate a shift away from these ideas or policies, ending becomes a logical position to take up. Ending, in this reading, often leads to kneejerk reactions that prematurely kill off neoliberalism. When neoliberalism hangs around in some shape or form, these kneejerk reactions give way to the zombie metaphor, which still reads coherency into neoliberalism but finds incoherency in the world outside of it.³⁰ In their challenge to the zombie metaphor, William Callison and Zachary Manfredi argue that

These “quasi-teleological” understandings of neoliberalism see the end as “imminent” rather than “immanent” because ending is conceived always as the result of logical processes of history. Neoliberalism's survival becomes a cog in the machine of history, and if we remain committed to the teleological theory of historical development, then we can only conclude that neoliberalism somehow lives on beyond its logical end. Against this vision of zombie neoliberalism, Callison and Manfredi develop the “mutant” metaphor, where “within the ‘species’ of neoliberalism, new variants are emerging that are distinct but nevertheless members of the same cast.”³² Taking up the position of ending, therefore, misses how neoliberalism bends rather than breaks, how it adapts to and also continues to adapt the postcrisis environment.

Alongside the teleological view of history, a Eurocentric and often Anglocentric view of neoliberalism dominates the ending approach to neoliberalism.³³ Critical analyses of neoliberalism have always suffered from this myopia, a framing that sees neoliberalism hibernating in intellectual circles and think tanks in western Europe and the United States and then bleeding outward to the rest of the world through the late twentieth century.³⁴ This narrative is challenged by a recent collection, Market Civilisations (2022), which provides a history of neoliberal thought from the Southern Hemisphere and eastern Europe. This history, as the editors Slobodian and Plehwe argue, shows that “neoliberalism is often most radical when it travels farthest from the ‘heartland’ of the industrial North and West.”³⁵ Neoliberalism takes on many guises outside of its heartlands, sliding across the political spectrum and taking turns that we do not necessarily see in the Global North. By situating the end of neoliberalism in the United States and western Europe, we ignore how the so-called periphery is essential to neoliberalism as a global system, and we might also miss how the neoliberal “heartlands” can find models to adapt to shifting global circumstances from this “periphery.”

Ending neoliberalism also entails making a distinction between policy paradigms or political transformations and modes of subjectification. There are continuities between right-wing and left-wing versions of neoliberalism, alongside forms of neoliberal institutionalization and depoliticization, that grant neoliberalism a political malleability that ensures its longevity. Neoliberalism has proven itself to be as much at home in authoritarianism and hard-border nationalisms as it is in progressive cosmopolitanism. But, crucially, neoliberalism has never only been a political or economic project. There was a reason why Margaret Thatcher insisted that “economics are the method; the aim is to change the soul.” As Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval put it, “At stake in neoliberalism is nothing more, nor less, than the form of existence—the way in which we conduct ourselves, to relate to others and to ourselves.”³⁶ Thus we must take seriously the idea that neoliberalism is a “subjective economy,” as Maurizio Lazzarato calls it, “that solicits and produces processes of subjectivation.”³⁷ The promotion of the entrepreneurial self, the extension of personal responsibility, the pervasiveness of debt, and so on, have unearthed new forms of subjectivity today.³⁸ Ending tends to separate method from soul and thus sees any shifts in economic or political method as representative of a simultaneous transformation in the social soul.

Rising and Falling

These features of ending emerge in different ways across the various obituaries for neoliberalism over the last three decades. But to think through the political implications of ending, let me turn to one recent text in detail, Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). Ending is a position that Gerstle has taken up before in his popular collection with Steve Fraser, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989). In his more recent book, he applies a similar framework to neoliberalism. As I noted above, I am not arguing that Gerstle's book is somehow paradigmatic or representative of all the features of ending discussed above. Instead, a reading of Gerstle's book allows us to make sense of how theorists have tried to make sense, to paraphrase Kermode, of neoliberalism's end. That is, it gives us an example of the framework of ending in action and how it shapes the way in which the theorist reads the events in front of them. It also brings to light the political limitations of a reading that is invested in neoliberalism's end.

Gerstle's history of the neoliberal order in the United States deviates from many existing histories of neoliberalism. For one, Gerstle draws a deep genealogical line between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, a line that many historians of neoliberalism (and, indeed, neoliberal thinkers) have sought to sever in some shape or form. In fact, the overarching debate at the Walter Lippman Colloquium in 1938, the first significant international meeting of neoliberal intellectuals, was over which aspects of classical liberalism needed to be saved or scrapped.³⁹ The German economist Alexander Rüstow summarized the different positions taken up at the meeting: “It is undeniable that here, in our circle, two different viewpoints are represented. Some find nothing essential to criticise or change in traditional liberalism. . . . The rest of us seek responsibility for the decline of liberalism in liberalism itself; and, as a result, we seek the solution in a fundamental renewal of liberalism.”⁴⁰ It was a debate that was never fully solved between the neoliberal intellectuals, or, at least, they never quite agreed on precisely how neoliberalism evolved from classical liberalism. But intellectual historians and political economists have broadly agreed that neoliberalism differs significantly from aspects of classical liberalism, most notably in the active role of the state in protecting the market from democratic interventions.⁴¹ Martijn Konings helpfully lays out the key differences between classical liberalism and neoliberalism:

In other words, neoliberals retain a suspicion about unrestrained markets and realize that in order for them to function, they require particular forms of state infrastructure.

Against this now widely accepted viewpoint, Gerstle argues that state intervention to protect the market was in fact a feature of classical liberalism, especially in the United States, and that the “neo” of neoliberalism “was less about distinguishing this liberalism from classical liberalism than about separating it from what modern liberalism . . . had become”—namely, in the shape of New Deal capitalism.⁴³ This is a provocative argument, but it is one that Gerstle never unpacks in any significant detail, only dedicating a few pages to it in the introduction. Undoubtedly, classical liberalism required certain forms of state intervention—the invisible hand always had a puppeteer—but this does not tell us anything specific about neoliberalism per se. Nor does it tell us much about the diversity of nineteenth-century liberal thought. Neoliberal intellectuals, and indeed subsequent neoliberal politicians, were aware of classical liberalism's theorizations of and associations with the state. But the world had changed significantly by the 1920s. The early neoliberals, as Slobodian has shown, were responding as much to the decline of the European empires, not to mention the rise of socialism, as they were to the crisis of liberalism.⁴⁴ The period of decolonization in the aftermath of the Second World War only exacerbated their concerns.⁴⁵ The point here, then, is not so much whether classical liberalism required certain forms of state intervention. Few, including neoliberal intellectuals, would question such an assertion. Rather, the key is to ascertain what kind of states were and are doing the intervening. It was this point that the neoliberal intellectuals concerned themselves with over the course of the twentieth century.

Gerstle's counterhistory enables him to see an apparition of the End in the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and, additionally, the return of the state during the COVID-19 pandemic—a state that looks a lot like the liberal state of New Deal capitalism. Gerstle writes that “the pandemic worked to intensify a development that the decline in the neoliberal order had already set in motion: namely, a conviction that government was the only institution with the wherewithal to address severe economic and social hardship.”⁴⁶ But it is hard to know exactly who holds this “conviction.” Is it politicians, government bureaucrats, experts, or the general public? Certainly, the last few years have been awash with headlines that public trust in governments is at an all-time low, and the antimandate protests across the Global North were a good indicator of this distrust.⁴⁷ If there is such a conviction about the benefits of government, it would appear that it is an ambiguous and volatile one, at best.

The limiting features of ending as a theoretical position also emerge in Gerstle's continual association of neoliberalism with free movement and open borders, which sees the recent prominence of wall builders and anti-immigrant firebrands as symptomatic of neoliberalism's disorder. The upsurge of anti-immigrant politics can only signify neoliberalism's demise if we start with a very limited working definition of both neoliberalism and contemporary border regimes. If the neoliberal decades have witnessed an intensification of migration to the Global North, this intensification has always been selective and exclusionary, intertwined with flows of capital and temporary labor regimes and fortressed by the escalation of border security and surveillance.⁴⁸ Free movement has never been free to all. Australia's offshore detention regime, Fortress Europe, and the imprisoning of migrants on the US-Mexico border, to name but a few examples, all predate the rise of Trump and other ethnonationalists. Trumpism might have promulgated an idea that the United States needed to take back control of its borders, but these borders have never been more controlled than during the last four decades. Further, through technology, training, and information sharing, the reach and influence of these borders have extended well beyond US territory, becoming, as Todd Miller writes, “paramount to the scaffolding of the current order of the globe, managing the antagonisms . . . between the haves and have nots.”⁴⁹ In this context, we could very easily view recent anti-immigrant policies as harbingers of neoliberalism's resoluteness, especially as part of its authoritarian and punitive turn since the 2008 financial crisis.⁵⁰

Furthermore, this double movement between open and closed borders, to cast it in Polanyian language, has always been mediated by race, because, as Arun Kundnani has persuasively argued, the liberal cosmopolitanism that Gerstle and other thinkers associate with neoliberalism obfuscates the forms of racial domination that are intrinsic to the history of neoliberalism as an idea and a framework for policymaking:

Neoliberalism has always been a civilizing mission, one in which Western culture—embodied in the market—is situated as superior to all other cultural forms.⁵² This cultural superiority was evident, as Kundnani shows, in Friedrich Hayek's theory of cultural evolution, which situates Western civilization as the “cultural framework” through which the neoliberal market order becomes embedded.⁵³ It was present, as Jessica Whyte shows, when Ludwig von Mises stated, “The peoples who have developed the system of the market economy and cling to it are in every respect superior to all other peoples.”⁵⁴ It was also apparent in the anxious tones of Wilhelm Röpke when he opined, “The spirit of the barbarians, which the Western peoples thought they had tamed by centuries of struggle, is abroad again and threatens to destroy the civilising work of all these centuries.”⁵⁵ As neoliberalism translated from thought to policy, it instituted forms of racial domination that were integral rather than antithetical to the genealogy of neoliberal ideas. Behind the facade of free movement and multiculturalism in the neoliberal decades lies a deeply hierarchical and discriminatory political project, of which contemporary border regimes are manifestations. Ethnonationalists and anti-immigrant demagogues do not spell the end of neoliberalism any more than liberal cosmopolitans symbolize its apotheosis.

This misunderstanding of free movement in the history of neoliberalism reveals a broader issue in Gerstle's reading of its end—namely, the idea that any antidemocratic developments represent a shift away from neoliberalism. Here, Gerstle refuses to engage with the copious amounts of research on the relationship between authoritarianism and neoliberalism, especially how neoliberalism and the far right perform a “contradictory embrace.”⁵⁶ Certainly, the far right presents challenges to neoliberalism—most notably, squaring the circle of the needs of globalized capital and the ideals of isolationist nationalism.⁵⁷ But the idea that authoritarian and neofascist populisms are somehow external to neoliberal logic ignores the extent to which a suspicion of democracy, to varying degrees, is deeply embedded within the history of neoliberal thought. When it comes to a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, neoliberals will more likely than not choose authoritarianism if it means protecting capitalism from democracy.⁵⁸ When prominent neoliberals like Hayek and Milton Friedman commended Augusto Pinochet's brutally repressive dictatorship, for example, they did so not because they necessarily supported the violence of his regime but rather were glad that his regime wrestled Chile from the grips of Salvador Allende's socialism.

Gerstle writes that “Trump wanted the breakup of the neoliberal order to benefit the authoritarian right.”⁵⁹ But, as we have seen, antidemocratic tendencies and neoliberalism are certainly compatible. As Slobodian puts it, “When we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism, then its supposed opposition to the populism of the Right begins to dissolve.”⁶⁰ This “retooling” is not at odds with authoritarianism if the purpose of such authoritarianism is to protect the architectonics of contemporary capitalism. If we follow Slobodian's and others’ arguments, it is more convincing to argue that Trump's authoritarianism brought into existence a new mutation of neoliberalism that reinforces rather than weakens the defense of capitalism against democracy. And it is this mutation that strengthens the authoritarian right.

My ultimate point here is not simply to critique the merits of Gerstle's argument. Rather, it is to show that approaching neoliberalism through the theoretical lens of ending can frame evidence in a certain way, one that enables, following Kermode, “imaginative investments in coherent patterns” to be made. Through the lens of ending, Gerstle reads into all recent geopolitical and global events symptoms of neoliberalism's demise. Order appears from chaos; beginnings, middles, and ends emerge as clear cartographic points; a terrain is represented that can be coherently mapped and observed. Such a map can be useful in that it allows us to at least contemplate the end of neoliberalism, but it can also be reductive and critically limiting. Even insisting on an “order” implies that the historian is somewhere beyond the End or, at the very least, can conceive of that End as a reality. We cannot create order from within the middle; it can only be constructed retrospectively. In the case of the “neoliberal order,” as Gerstle calls it, we might miss its mutations and adaptations; we might miss what disorder tells us about the present conjuncture.

The Ends of Ending

It is one thing to point out the limitations of ending, especially in the context of neoliberalism, but it is another thing to think through alternatives to ending that do not themselves require forms of ending that presume coherent patterns of beginnings, middles, and ends. To say, for instance, that we need to pay attention to neoliberal mutations is not to imply that neoliberalism is intrinsically endless, or at least has the potential to be endless. Instead, it is to say that the ways in which neoliberalism's end have been theorized to date, in the works cited above, is a limited one that depends on “imaginative investments in coherent patterns,” even when the empirical reality suggests otherwise. However, this does not mean that we should abandon ending altogether; otherwise we lose a critical tool in our intellectual and political armory on the left. Without ending, it becomes impossible to imagine beyond neoliberalism, because every shift, every mutation, is merely another sign of neoliberalism's self-replication. But as neoliberalism's recurring survival of a series of seemingly terminal crises suggests, there is no causal relationship between ending as a theoretical framework and the real end of neoliberalism. My aim in this conclusion is to imagine some of the ways we might develop a framework of ending that can be employed in a political project to actually end neoliberalism.

The task, as I see it, is to find forms of ending that do not make “imaginative investments in coherent patterns” of beginnings, middles, and ends—that is, forms of ending that reject “a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” and thus resist a coherent narrative about the past, a narrative that also imagines a future as a logical product of the apparent coherency of this past. Such a task might not bring coherence to the narrative that is constructed as a result of the framing of ending, and thus such a narrative might not be as satisfying to the theorist or the reader. But this resistance makes room for an open-endedness that can be politically useful, for it leaves space for the imagining and building of postneoliberal, perhaps even postcapitalist futures that are not necessarily beholden to the end that has been declared and that, as has been proved in case of neoliberalism, might not eventuate.

I think this open-endedness is what Davies and Gane mean when they say that “post-neoliberalism is not used as a descriptor of a world beyond neoliberalism but rather as a device for questioning the mutation of previous forms of liberalism and neoliberalism and the challenges they pose in the present.”⁶¹ Ending can do the same. Rather than acting as a temporal marker, from which a coherent narrative about neoliberalism can be deduced, ending can be a “device” that enables us to bring into question the ways in which we have understood neoliberalism to date. In the midst of each crisis, the very posing of the question of neoliberalism's end can serve as a prompt not to construct a narrative about neoliberalism but to theorize the logics, conditions, and assumptions through which we have come to ask the question of neoliberalism's end. Here, ending acts more like a metatheoretical device, one in which ending as a framework through which to theorize neoliberalism, in the ways I have laid out above, becomes the subject of theorization, like I have tried to do in this article. Doing so allows us to simultaneously keep open the limitations and possibilities of a framework of ending, to see both what ending stops us from doing and what it might allow us to do in other circumstances, especially if we resist the desire to construct coherent patterns. For me, as I see it, the capacity to produce this simultaneity is the great gift of critical theory.

And this discussion is not only theoretical. Perhaps the most worrying thing for the left, particularly in the West, is that the right, certainly in the last decade, have been much better at embracing an open-ended version of ending in the face of shifting economic and social conditions. The right—which includes the traditional parliamentary parties of the center-right across Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand that have been dragged further to the right, as well as libertarian and far-right parties, intellectuals, and movements that have burgeoned in the last decade—have also cultivated a theory of ending, not necessarily of neoliberalism but of a broad liberal paradigm in general. In so doing, they have been adept at moving with the various postcrisis mutations of neoliberalism, incorporating these mutations into social imaginaries revolving around the nation, strong borders, and social and cultural conservatism. The right is by no means coherent or uniformed in its approach to these postcrisis mutations, ranging from calls to embed neoliberal policies more aggressively to an explicit antineoliberal politics. But, either way, they are often able to present themselves as the only logical response to crises, primarily due to the flexibility of the social imaginaries they develop.

The left are thus routinely outmaneuvered on two flanks, by both the neoliberal and antineoliberal right. The neoliberal right adapt neoliberalism to the shifting social and economic conditions, insisting that the end of neoliberalism has been overplayed.⁶² The antineoliberal right, by contrast, present what seems to be an increasingly more persuasive version of a postneoliberal order for many citizens. As Melinda Cooper points out in her analysis of far-right antiausterity politics across Europe in the mid-2010s, “Far-right parties from Golden Dawn and the Front National to Jobbik and CasaPound have seized on the event of sovereign debt crisis to position themselves as the only credible architects of a new post(neo)liberal political order, often borrowing from the work of left-wing and heterodox economists to work out the details of their economic agendas.”⁶³ This is, of course, not to disregard the successes of left-wing populism since the 2008 crisis, from Syriza and Podemos to Corbyn and Sanders, but it would be difficult to argue that these movements have captured the political imagination in quite the same way as the contemporary (far) right. The antineoliberal right, in particular, have been able to develop a dark and nihilistic theory of neoliberalism's end where the “primary social conflict . . . does not reside between classes but between the inside and outside of the nation-state, between stranger and citizen.”⁶⁴ For them, ending neoliberalism is an anticosmopolitan political project that can be built from grassroots agitation, vigilante violence, and infiltrating established electoral parties or creating new far-right alternatives. In other words, for parts of the contemporary right, ending neoliberalism is very much an active process, one in which ending can be used to mobilize different ends.

On the left, however, the overwhelming sense from critical accounts of neoliberalism is that ending is something that happens to neoliberalism and not something we do to it. We might disagree on exactly which events or policies signify neoliberalism's end, but we tend to agree on one thing, even if this is never explicitly acknowledged: if neoliberalism is to end, it will be market crises, financial capital, platforms, right-wing nationalists, interventionist states, or deadly pandemics that will kill it. Ending is thus inhabited by a sense that we are analyzing and theorizing events that we are affected by but not actively involved in shaping. Ending characterizes a critical passivity in our encounters with neoliberalism. We might argue, therefore, that ending projects into neoliberalism the left's failure to actively confront and defeat neoliberalism. This assertion takes us back to the question posed in the introduction about the left's “termination fascination” with neoliberalism. There appears to be a psychic attachment to neoliberalism's end, which instead of reflecting something particular about neoliberalism actually tells us more about the impotency of the post-1989 left's social imaginaries. Without a viable alternative to capitalism, the best we can hope for is an implosion of neoliberalism to allow for the transition to a watered-down version of social democracy or the like. Even the left-wing populist wave of the twenty-first century, which seemed to offer a genuine alternative for the left, has largely given way to a return to Third Way leftist politics at a party-political level.

Over and over again, the left has employed ending to construct a coherent narrative about neoliberalism only to find itself having to come to terms with open-endedness. The question remains, however, how an alternative framework of ending, one that retains open-endedness, as I outlined above, might help the left out of this self-defeating cycle. Let us take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example to think through such a framework. There are undoubtedly many reasons to suggest that the neoliberal paradigm has shifted as a result of the pandemic, as there are also reasons to argue that many features of that paradigm have continued. But while important, this debate inevitably descends into competing narratives about what neoliberalism is and/or has been. However, if we ask why the pandemic leads us to declare the end of neoliberalism, especially given that we have fallen into this trap before on the left, we are not in search of a coherent narrative about neoliberalism but are instead investigating the wider conditions under which we come to identify the end of neoliberalism in the pandemic. This shift in focus forces us to reckon with the uncomfortable thought that declarations of neoliberalism's end might not necessarily be a reflection of neoliberalism but more a reflection of the position from which we try to make sense of neoliberalism. And while it might be uncomfortable, this shift in focus also carries significant political potential, because we have to confront the fact that if neoliberalism is to end, it must be ended—it requires action. In other words, by employing ending as a metatheoretical device, we do not reduce the future to the aftermath of a coherent narrative about the past but instead conceptualize a future that is full of possibilities, that is open-ended, and that must be enacted.

To paraphrase the epigraph to this article from the late Mike Davis, we can quote Gramsci all we want, but the End does not make way for the new unless we actively create conditions for its birth.⁶⁵ Stuart Hall was insistent on this point too: “When the left talks about crisis, all we see is capitalism disintegrating, and us marching in and taking over. . . . [But] there is no law of history which can predict what must inevitably be the outcome of a political struggle. . . . History is not waiting in the wings to catch up your mistakes into another inevitable success. You lose because you lose because you lose.”⁶⁶ The several unsuccessful declarations of neoliberalism's end suggest that the right have been much better at capturing the political struggle that emerges in the midst. By the time we realize that neoliberalism has mutated rather than died, we have already lost. Hall witnessed this development at the end of the 1970s in the context of Thatcherism, when he argued that “the swing to the Right is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a response to the crisis.”⁶⁷ Crises do not simply bring into existence alternative political trajectories. Instead, political movements make crises their own; they do not simply march in and take over but actively shape the conditions in their favor.

The more urgent political question, therefore, should not be, “Is neoliberalism ending?,” but, “How do we end neoliberalism?” The former assumes coherence, whereas the latter does not need coherence.⁶⁸ This latter question forces us, repeating Kermode's words, to “show a marked respect for things as they are.” There is no doubt that neoliberalism as we have known it is shifting; it is undeniably an opportunity for the left. Things are up for grabs, but only if we grab them. Ending neoliberalism, as it currently stands, prevents us from grabbing the political initiative and relegates us to the status of mere passive observers of events that others take part in. In the spirit of Kermode, we must embrace an immanent rather than imminent ending of neoliberalism, one that can allow the space for a connection to develop between the theoretical understanding of neoliberalism's end and concrete political action that seeks to end neoliberalism. Without such a connection, the postneoliberal world that emerges will be the one imagined and enacted by the right. In this context, ending is an urgent political task for the left, because it is our only way to imagine and bring about a postneoliberal world worth living in.

Notes

Works Cited