From Old to New Materialism: Rethinking Freedom after Neoliberalism

Abstract

While critiques of neoliberalism have acknowledged its departure from classical liberalism in terms of economic policy, they have failed to recognize its distinctive form of humanism, especially as enacted through the concept of freedom. This essay argues that, because of its antihumanist convictions, new materialism can be to neoliberalism what Marxist materialism was to classical liberalism. Marx’s critique of liberalism relies on the liberal view of the human as homo sapiens, but neoliberalism reimagines the human as homo oeconomicus. Under neoliberalism, state, market, human, and nature have all been subsumed under the flattened logic of capital. Marx might help us take government to task for failing to protect the environment from the market, but a government in the grips of neoliberalism will acknowledge the problem and cultivate creative ways for the market to solve it. New materialism enables an immanent critique of neoliberalism along the lines of Marx’s critique of classical liberalism because it shares neoliberalism’s flattened ontology. Proponents and opponents alike have sometimes situated these ‘new’ and ‘old’ materialisms as hostile to each other, but I maintain that tracing the materialist argument from Marx through figures like Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Jane Bennett can strengthen the critique of capital under neoliberalism.