From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

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.