What Is Neoliberal Bureaucracy?

Abstract

This bureaucratic dimension of neoliberalism, even though it may appear paradoxical or indeed shocking from the point of view of current ideology, is familiar to specialists in the historical sociology of politics and to readers of the great classics of this discipline. Thus, the analysis of the craze for rules and norms mentioned above now goes back over a century, to when Max Weber showed that, historically speaking, liberalism had created an expansion in the number of economic institutions, and that the development of bureaucracy was closely linked with the development of capitalism. Karl Polanyi was continuing this tradition when he pointed out that “there was nothing natural about laissezfaire,” and highlighted the way liberalism triggered an unprecedented growth in legislative and administrative measures, precisely so as to facilitate the dismantling of obstacles to the commodification of land, money, and labor.1 Historians have shown that the markets were created by human interventions, especially on the part of the state.2 In this sense—and this is my way of putting it—this was a bureaucratic process because, in order for it to be accomplished, rules had to be invented and procedures put in place. Writing within this tradition, Michel Foucault pointed out that “the market … was, of course, invested with extremely prolifıc and strict regulations”:3 an art of governing based on the market cannot be embodied in laissez-faire, but rather in a “framework policy”4 paving the way for an “active” governmentality necessary to ensuring that society as a whole conforms to the principles of enterprise, competition, and the market.