Abstract
This paper argues that the neoliberal political order relies on a particular concept of publicity—the concept of openness or transparency without a public (a populus or demos), the main content of which is the unconditional maxim “There Is No Alternative” (TINA for short). Its central claim is that the neoliberal conception of publicity without a public, connected as it is to secrecy and unconditional adherence to TINA, precludes the possibility of the “people” as an ultimate intentional sovereign legislator. Although research has revealed the strategic importance of publicity for communicative capitalism, this aspect of neoliberalism has yet to be addressed. As a means of clarifying the neoliberal concept of publicity, this paper will show that neoliberal theory cannot consistently accept the existence of the people as sovereign while maintaining its adherence to TINA. Second, it invokes the Kantian conception of publicity, which involves not merely openness and visibility but also the will of the populus. One of Kant’s central insights is that publicity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for fairness at the level of political decision-making. When public (openly accessible) statements are not based on the will of the people, publicity can become a means of illegitimate political domination against sovereign peoples. Building on Kant’s insights, this paper will show that publicity without a public, along with its central mantra, TINA, is also, at the practical level, neoliberalism’s main means of destroying the legislative sovereignty of the people. Since TINA precludes the possibility of the people as sovereign, analysis of the neoliberal conception of publicity that underlies TINA provides new arguments for the view that neoliberalism is essentially despotic in nature. It also points to the importance of the political category of “the sovereign people”, which is all the greater where illiberal and undemocratic political alternatives jockey to fill the vacuum left by a system that, at its ideological core, cannot acknowledge the common good.
Highlights
The supposed inevitability of proposed or adopted political measures is commonly appealed to in various political systems
Against the backdrop of this systematic pattern, this paper argues that there is no alternative” (TINA) is not a phrase coined by Margaret Thatcher (Jenkins, 2007) without conceptual value
In addition to referring to the openness and visibility of political principles, the Kantian approach to publicity speaks to the Latin publicus and populus
Summary
The supposed inevitability of proposed or adopted political measures is commonly appealed to in various political systems. Because they are supported by individuals who follow different political ideologies and who see themselves as members of a political society, neoliberal politicians in liberal democracies must convince and persuade citizens that, instead of pursuing public well-being or the common good and following public rules, they should pursue their unrestricted private well-being instead.
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