Cultivating the State of Nature: Neoliberal Statecraft as Gardening

null, Jessica Whyte

In 1990, as former socialists increasingly sought to rehabilitate of the market as the primary means of social and economic coordination, Fredric Jameson argued that there was one proposition that could not be allowed to stand unchallenged: “The market is in human nature.” Here I show that support for Jameson’s challenge could be found in a surprising place: for the strands of neoliberalism emerging from the Austrian School of Economics and German Ordoliberalism, the market was anything but a reflection of human nature. In this paper, I focus on Friedrich Hayek’s account of the evolution of competitive market societies and show that, far from trying to legitimize the market through reference to a state of nature, Hayek portrayed human nature as a barrier to the competitive market. The development of a market economy, he argued, required the suppression of ‘natural’ human inclinations towards egalitarianism and collectivism, conditioned by millennia of tribal existence. And, against the contractualism and voluntarism of those he disparaged as ‘design’ theorists, Hayek argued that “man has been civilized very much against his will.” In this paper, I examine the distinctive form of statecraft entailed by this vision. For Hayek, governing a market society was neither a matter of laissez-faire nor of deliberate design. Rather, it required eternal vigilance to prevent the resurgence of what he called “suppressed primordial instincts”. My focus is on Hayek’s use of the metaphor of the gardener, which I suggest reveals the distinctiveness of much neoliberal thinking about the relation between politics and markets. The liberal attitude to society, Hayek argued, was akin to that of a gardener, who must create the conditions for optimal growth. As innocuous as this process of cultivation may sound, I argue that it licensed authoritarianism and violence to “weed out” egalitarian forms of sociality that were seen as threats to the market order.

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