Free-Market Anticapitalism: Ordoliberalism, Antiglobalism, and the Spectre of Authoritarianism
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Free-Market Anticapitalism reconsiders the historical evolution of neoliberal political ideology and the “anti-capitalist” politics of the far-right, offering a new perspective on debates regarding neoliberalism’s authoritarian character, far-right critiques of neoliberalism and far-right political economy. Contemporary scholarly developments on neoliberal studies have demonstrated the importance of understanding neoliberalism as both a “return to politics” and a “depoliticising strategy”, re-centring the neoliberal state as a dialectical unity. Concomitant to this, contemporary far-right formations have singled out their denunciation of globalised neoliberal societies by claiming a move towards recuperating the primacy of politics over economic life lost due to neoliberalisation. This articulation opens a paradox in the relationship between the former and the latter. This thesis argues that by tracing the continuities between some forms of neoliberalism and the far-right’s understanding of the state’s political form as an aspect of a shared, perverted “anti-capitalism”, we can uncover the mutual relationship. This thesis will argue that behind the European far-right most often understood as antithetical to neoliberalism, we can find the radicalisation and political resolution of a neoliberal contradiction most clearly articulated by its German iteration, ordoliberalism. To substantiate this claim, this thesis will follow the development of ordoliberalism as it evolved alongside and as a critique of neoliberalism’s most mainstream ideological articulations. Covering the evolution of different critiques of capitalism outside the socialist camp from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, this thesis will discuss ordoliberal alongside elitist, sociological and far-right accounts of Capitalism. This thesis will focus on the formulation of an alternative neoliberal authoritarianism that emphasises the “natural” limits of the market as a precondition for the preservation of a competitive free-market order alongside the “non-market” spheres of family and community and below the “political” sphere of a Strong State.
Author: Hernandez Fernandez, FA
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7056802446