The Iron Cage of Enterprise or the Restoration of Class Power? Approaches to Understanding Neoliberalism

Abstract

Recent Foucauldian critiques of neoliberalism – especially those by Wendy Brown, Béatrice Hibou, and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval – have argued that the Marxist interpretation of neoliberalism as a class project is reductive and economistic, and have instead conceptualised neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality. This article compares these two influential approaches to understanding neoliberalism. It will outline the central features of the Foucauldian and Marxist approaches, assess the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and argue that a synthesis of the two approaches is both possible and desirable. While the Foucauldian approach enables a microphysics of everyday neoliberalism and its modes of subjectivity, it is argued that such an analysis must be placed within the broader, macrostructural approach of Marxism. The article thus defends Marxism against its Foucauldian critique, while nonetheless encouraging Marxists to engage with Foucauldian accounts of neoliberalism which they have so far tended to ignore.