Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Neoliberalism,
Democracy, and the Environment in 'Trump Country'
John Hultgren
Theory & Event, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 271-296 (Article)
John Hultgren
Introduction
In the small town of Stephenson, Michigan, opponents of a proposed
open-pit sulfide mine pack a high school gymnasium to address their
concerns to the state Department of Environmental Quality.1 In rural
Virginia, locals engage in tree-sits and protests in efforts to stop the
300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline from being constructed.2 At an
EPA “Community Engagement” event in Exeter, New Hampshire,
residents of manufacturing towns—like Hoosick Falls, New York and
Merrimack, New Hampshire—forcefully condemn the agency’s insuf-
ficient response to drinking water contaminated by perfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS).3 These recent examples of environmental activism
are indicative of a broader trend: as environmental crises increase in
scope and intensity, resistance is emerging in locales that have other-
wise served as strongholds of conservatism and emblems of anti-envi-
ronmentalism. And, far from reflecting the unpopular ideas of a loud
minority, there is reason to believe that—at least in some cases—the
activists’ views represent widespread public sentiment in the area.4
How might we understand the paradox of intense and widespread
environmental activism emanating from communities that staunchly
Theory & Event Vol. 23, No. 1, 271–296 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press
272 Theory & Event
both persons and states are construed on the model of the con-
temporary firm, both persons and states are expected to comport
themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the pres-
Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance? 275
ent and enhance their future value, and both persons and states do
so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/
or attracting investors.21
Central to this enterprise form is the concept of human capital, and its
entrance into the rationalities of the state and citizen alike. Foucault
claims that the goal of the neoliberals is “to bring labor into the field of
economic analysis… to put [themselves] in the position of the person
who works.”22 Contra Marx, this does not mean considering how labor
power is sold and surplus value is wrested away by the owners of the
means of production; rather, neoliberalism views income as a return
on one’s own capital investment. Human capital is “the set of all those
physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn
this or that wage.”23 This is not, Foucault underscores, a conception
of labor power but of capital-ability; if flourishing personally and pro-
fessionally depends upon one’s skill set, over time, “the worker him-
self appears as a sort of enterprise for himself.”24 The political effect is
an erasure of labor as a social concept: “[w]hen everything is capital,
labor disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class, taking
with it the analytic basis for alienation, exploitation, and association
among laborers.”25 The role of the state is no longer to mediate rela-
tions between labor and capital, but to increase human capital; “[t]hus
all the problems of health care and public hygiene must, or at any rate,
can be rethought as elements which may or may not improve human
capital.”26
According to Brown, Foucault correctly outlines the shifts from
a classical liberal to a neoliberal subject (the gradual expansion and
intensification of homo oeconomicus), but was unable to foresee the cen-
trality of finance capital to contemporary political economic relations.
“Today, homo oeconomicus… has been significantly reshaped as finan-
cialized human capital: its project is to self-invest in ways that enhance
its value or to attract investors through constant attention to its actual
or figurative credit rating, and to do this across every sphere of exis-
tence.”27 The neoliberal subject, Phillip Mirowski concurs, “is a jumble
of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but
equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced,
shorted, hedged against, and minimized.”28
Brown believes that liberalism has long been a struggle between
homo oeconomicus (man as an economic actor) and homo politicus (man
as a collective participant in the polis). But for the first four centuries
it was a fair fight: “the prominence of man’s economic features in
modern thought and practice reconfigures without extinguishing his
political features—again, these include deliberation, belonging, aspi-
rational sovereignty, concern with the common and with one’s rela-
tion to justice in the common.”29 Today, however, it appears that homo
276 Theory & Event
oeconomicus has won, once and for all: “neoliberal reason, ubiquitous
today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, cul-
ture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly
political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent
elements into economic ones.”30
In such a context, she asks,“[h]ow do subjects reduced to human
capital reach for or even wish for popular power?” The answer, per-
haps, is through support for popular demagogues driven by exclu-
sionary nationalisms. There exists a lengthy line of non-neoliberal
impulses that have emerged in the efforts to institutionalize the neo-
liberal project; the neoliberals’ recognition that the state must actively
cultivate neoliberal subjects, and their opposition to democracy, has
routinely lead to a willingness to use coercive force of the state in
the service of the market. Two core problems for neoliberals are 1)
what to do with “non-productive” subjects and 2) how to manage
those instances where the majority refuses to accede to the rule of
the market. In the abstract, neoliberal thinkers resolve this—Hayek,
by making a case for the market’s promotion of the Rule of Law and
contrasting them both (the market and the rule of law) to democracy,
and Friedman, by arguing that consumer sovereignty is the most dem-
ocratic form of expression, one that helps mediate factionalism and
maximize freedom conceived as individual choice.31 In practice, neo-
liberals’ frequent support for authoritarian regimes suggests that rhe-
torical nods to democracy are mere smokescreens to cover adherents’
market fundamentalism. This anti-democratic tendency reflects not an
incidental commitment of a few neoliberals led astray but a constitu-
tive component of the neoliberal logic: “[t]he replacement of citizen-
ship defined as concern with the public good by citizenship reduced
to the citizen as homo oeconomicus also eliminates the very idea of a
people, a demos asserting its collective political sovereignty.”32
The ground for Trump’s rise was tilled not just by neoliberal-
ism’s destruction of viable lives and futures for working and
middle-class populations through the global outsourcing of jobs,
the race to the bottom in wages and taxes, and the destruction of
public goods, including education. This ground was also tilled by
neoliberalism’s valorization of markets and morals and its deval-
uation of democracy and politics, Constitutionalism and social
justice.36
is contingent upon the structuring of life into two distinct zones: zoē
(the state of living common to all sentient beings) and bios (political
qualified life or life in the polis). Buttressing this distinction is a sharp
dichotomy between oikos and the polis. The oikos refers to the household,
while the polis is where humans commit to “living together in a delib-
erately governed fashion, to self-rule in a settled association that com-
prises yet exceeds basic needs, and to the location of human freedom
and human perfectibility in political life.”48 The oikos is the space of
necessity, ruled by the patriarch and filled with natural inequalities
and power asymmetries; the polis is the space of appearance, where
free debate among equals over the proper way of living together and
achieving “the good life” reigns.49 The polis is ontologically prior to the
oikos, but participation in the polis requires that one is first freed from
the necessities of the oikos. “Status in the polis,” Habermas writes, was
“based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos (oikodespotes).”50
The oikos, as many have noted, is the original Greek root of the
words economy (oikonomia) and ecology (oekologie), but the former
was conceived of differently, and the latter was outside of the purview
of ancient concept of the household. The Greek household was com-
prised of “relations of rule and relations of production,”51 and oikonomia
simply referred to the proper husbanding of material resources for the
household.52 Moreover, economic affairs were limited by Aristotelian
morality. “Wealth is never to become its own end” and “wealth that is
accumulated for its own sake is unnatural.”53 Trading was only accept-
able insofar as it was necessary for a household’s self-sufficiency and
the maintenance of a community.54 Karl Polanyi observed that Aristotle
offered a critique of “incipient market trading at its very first appear-
ance in the history of civilization.”55 The important point here is that
the Ancient philosophers, despite their many flaws,56 put limits on the
development of homo oeconomicus, and indeed, privileged homo polit-
icus.
As liberal modernity emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the oikos/polis dichotomy was transposed onto the private/
public divide—with all the exclusionary baggage that entailed. The
public sphere, where citizens discuss and debate pressing issues, was
constructed as the locus of civilization, rationality, masculinity, and
progress, while the private, or “domestic,” sphere was taken to be gov-
erned by the laws of nature, emotion, femininity, and tradition. It is at
this moment where economic activities, which had previously been
confined to the space of necessity, “are permitted to appear in public,”57
and political economy—“the knowledge and practice required for gov-
erning the state and managing its population and resources”—enters
into existence.58 As Habermas notes:
280 Theory & Event
This turn toward the self-regulating market locked into a place a series
of tensions—between democracy and capitalism, politics and eco-
nomics, and market society and nature—that changed the location and
function of the oikos within social relations.60
The maturation of industrial capitalism over the course of the
nineteenth century unchained the economy from both the oikos and
the “excessive” interventions of the state; a reality enabled by the ideo-
logical naturalization of the economy as an autonomous sphere of
life, and the reduction of nature to a resource to be used in pursuit of
human progress. The implications of this were myriad. The expansion
of factory life and industrial agriculture restructured relations between
men and women, with the former increasingly engaged in wage labor
in industrial production and the latter responsible for the unwaged
and unrecognized labor of social reproduction. The home, here, was
transformed into a “social factory,” sustained by women’s labor, on
which the size, health, and, ultimately, productivity of the population
of industrial workers depended.61 The emerging industrial economy
also intersected with the state-sanctioned racism of the post-Civil War
political terrain in ways that echoed into the home. In the US West,
speculators, railroads and industrial agriculture took control of the
frontier under the guise of Homestead Acts purportedly in the interest
of the (white) working class,62 while in the South, potentially transfor-
mative projects of land redistribution, education, and working class
mobilization cracked under the weight of the wages of whiteness and
collapsed into the violence of Jim Crow.63
At the same time, however, the exclusionary projects constitutive
of liberalism were contested by nineteenth- and twentieth-century
social movements seeking to expand the public sphere and deepen
democratic practice. Over time, the poor, racial minorities, and women
struggled for and received formal equality within the polis, but de facto
inequality in government, the workplace and the home persisted—
even throughout the heyday of the welfare state. The collision between
governmental efforts to prime housing markets and the “great migra-
tion” of African-Americans spurred white flight to the suburbs, trans-
forming both social (race, class, gender) relations and nature/society
relations in the process: people of color faced racially restrictive cov-
Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance? 281
the Menominee, etc.—but this initial concern for the oikos is conjoined
to concern over the human and non-human inhabitants of nearby
areas, including the Menominee Reservation.93 Far from an individu-
alistic or an exclusionary conception of home, the campaign to “save
the Menominee” is reinvigorating communal attachments, and even
pushing some residents to grapple with the area’s settler colonial
legacy.94
While anecdotal, the example is illustrative of a broader trend:
as the decline of unionization and closure of factories has decreased
the extant strength of workplace activism, and as institutional bar-
riers (voting restrictions, the rise of corporate money, etc.) to full par-
ticipation and influence in the de jure public sphere have increased,
the home—the oikos—has become a more vital site of politics. To be
clear, I am not suggesting here that the oikos is the sole locus of polit-
ical hope today, or that residents of conservative communities are full
of undeclared environmentalists—there are complex political, histor-
ical, economic and cultural reasons why some communities support
resource extraction and some resist it.95 My argument, rather, is that the
oikos, properly conceived, functions as a material and symbolic bridge
linking ideology to subjectivity; a sphere of life that the literature on
democracy and neoliberalism has tended to neglect.
Conclusion
To draw too close a connection between a political economic ratio-
nale—neoliberalism—and a mode of subjectivity, misreads the social
terrain on which political struggles unfurl. It draws a direct equivalence
between governmental rationality and subjectivity with little attention
to the lived realities of everyday life. Governmental rationalities reso-
nate because of their embeddedness in our lives—the extent to which
they proffer plausible explanations for the realities in which we find
ourselves, and provide compelling visions for making our day-to-day
lives better. Anti-environmentalism, for instance, is cultivated both by
subjecting talk radio listeners to neoliberal talking points, and through
lived experiences—e.g. the forms of recreation that we engage in, the
food we consume, the design of our neighborhoods, and the transpor-
tation options available to us. Conversely, environmental ethics are
not merely passed down to subjects by environmental groups and the
Nature Channel, but also by backpacking in the mountains, digging
through the dirt in a garden, seeing a neighborhood park developed,
or recognizing that your relatives and friends are breathing toxic fumes
or drinking tainted water. The home isn’t the only locus where gov-
ernmental rationalities intersect with the material realities of everyday
life, but it is an increasingly important one. Attention to the undoing
of the oikos suggest that neoliberal rationality isn’t as deep-seated as
Brown fears; nor is the transition from neoliberal to neo-fascist subjec-
tivity quite as automatic.
None of this is to undercut Brown’s central thesis—as the spread
of neoliberalism “evacuates the content from liberal democracy and
transforms the meaning of democracy tout court, it subdues democratic
desires and imperils democratic dreams.”116 Neoliberalism creates
numerous points of blockage in efforts to cultivate a flourishing, just,
and sustainable democracy: making it more difficult to get accurate,
trustworthy information; transforming liberal arts education into job
training; decimating organized labor and making workplace struggles
more difficult to wage; stripping the state of its capacity to check cor-
porate power; and so on, and so on. Further, many people, like some
of those interviewed by Hochschild, have been transformed into neo-
liberal subjects. But the field of political ideologies to which we’re
290 Theory & Event
Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association, September 1, 2018, in Boston, MA.
The author would like to thank Em Ray, Sean Parson, Robert Kirsch, Michael
Lipscomb, and David Bond for helpful feedback. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
1. John Engel, “Coalition to Save the Menominee River,” [n.d.], http://
savethewildup.org/2018/03/coalition-to-save-the-menominee-river/
2. See, for example, “‘The Fire is Catching’: Mountain Valley Pipeline Faces
Fierce Opposition in the Virginias,” Earth First Journal, May 18, 2018,
https://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2018/05/18/the-fire-is-catching-moun-
tain-valley-pipeline-faces-fierce-opposition-in-the-virginias/
3. Author’s attendance at event. For a recap, see Jim Therrien, “Bennington’s
PFOA Story Among Those Highlighted at EPA Summit,” Bennington
Banner, June 25, 2018. https://www.benningtonbanner.com/stories/bennington-
expert-speaks-at-pfoa-summit-in-new-hampshire,543172
4. For example, seven counties, two cities, two towns, and dozens of tribal
governments and inter-tribal organizations in Upper Michigan and north-
east Wisconsin have passed resolutions opposing the aforementioned
mine. Out of the eleven counties, cities, and towns, all but one were car-
ried by Trump in the 2016 presidential election. At the recent DEQ hear-
ing, 300 concerned citizens packed the gym—84 residents testified against
the mine, while four people spoke in support. See, River Alliance of
Wisconsin, “Back 40 Mine Update and Action Alert,” May 10, 2018, https://
www.wisconsinrivers.org/back-40-contact-investors/; Engel, “Coalition to
Save the Menominee River.”
5. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and
the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); David Harvey, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance? 291
ico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533;
Cynthia Weber, “The Trump Presidency: Episode 1,” Theory & Event 20, S1
(2017): 132–142.
43. Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on
the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016); Cramer, Politics of
Resentment, 155–158; Gest, The New Minority, 83–4.
44. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land, 110–11.
45. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land, 179.
46. For a sympathetic critique in this vein, see Annie McClanahan, “Becoming
Non-Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the
Demos,” Theory & Event 20, no. 2 (2017): 510–519.
47. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 87.
48. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 87.
49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1958 [1998]), 36–7.
50. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989 [1962]), 3.
51. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 88.
52. Timothy Mitchell, “Rethinking Economy,” Geoforum 39, 3 (2008): 1116–
1121.
53. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 89.
54. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944 [2001]), 56–7; see also Benjamin
Jowett, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1885), xxii-
xxv.
55. Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Polanyi, Arensberg,
and Pearson (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., 1957), 67.
56. The flaws of the Ancient polis/oikos are numerous. Aristotle naturalized the
exclusion of women, the poor and slaves from political life, and viewed
democracy as a debased mode of government, ruled by the passions and
interests of the propertyless masses.
57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 46.
58. Mitchell, “Rethinking Economy,” 1116.
59. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 20.
60. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
61. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the
Subversion of Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1972).
62. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American
West (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987).
63. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The
Free Press, 1935 [1992]).
294 Theory & Event