The Paradox of Neo-liberalism

Abstract

In the spring and summer of 1938 two quite different seminars took place in Paris. One was the very well-known College de Sociologie, which in cluded the participation of Caillois and Bataille see 'Sacred Sociology of the Contemporary World', 2 April 1938, and the session 'Festival', 2 May 1939, in which Caillois indicates the importance of sacred games (in Hol lier 1988: 157-159, 279-303). The other was the Walter Lippman Colloque, 26-30 August 1938 (in Rougier 1939). The former was the significant fore runner of French sociology and philosophy from Derrida to Baudrillard decisively influenced by Marcel Mauss. The latter was the forerunner of what became the world hegemonic system of ideas from the 1980s neo liberalism which took up a position very specifically against Durkheim and Mauss, and all holistic and historicist sociology. Let us recall that in the 1930s Durkheim was widely interpreted as a dangerous corporatist thinker and certainly it is undeniable that Durkheim's main practical proposals called for greater development of professional organizations to enhance social solidarity. By the end of the 1930s a new style of liberalism, one that is now widely recognized as 'neo-liberalism', worked up an alternative to every kind of socialism and state-led social welfare. Foucault suggested the subsequent German post-war 'miracle' was the result of its first application. Taken up by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, neo-liberalism an nounced 'there is no such thing as society' and it soon became clear that a number of sociological terms were needed to describe the new phenom enon: affluent, post-industrial, post-modern, leisure, information, con sumer, the 'risk society'. I discuss this new miraculous but paradoxical society in two ways. The first is the very form its governmentality as an in stitutionalized anti-socialism. The second is the shift of its culture towards