Alter-neoliberal analysis: Abduction, critique, radical imagination

Abstract

Radical critique and praxis today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalities partly succeeded in encroaching upon emancipatory ambitions. On the one hand, as critical sociology informs us, this is because many of the utilitarian tenets of neoliberal rationalities have become naturalized in everyday conduct. On the other hand, as pragmatic sociology shows, because neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating critical activity into its mode of functioning, challenging neoliberalism comes at the cost of its partial reproduction. Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to reconsider both the role of critique in neoliberalism and the mode of inquiry of critique, in order to map out an ‘alter-neoliberal analysis’: a normative mode of critical inquiry that seeks to discover what would need to be the case for a future beyond neoliberalism to be conceivable. Building on the inferential logic of abduction, alter-neoliberal analysis (1) defamiliarizes the opaque ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to (2) critique them in ways that curtail their reproduction and (3) radically imagine politico-epistemological positions that are unintelligible to neoliberal rationalities.