Hayekian Neoliberalism as Negative Political Theology

In this paper, I will investigate the relationship between aspects of Whiteheadian process thought and political theology in Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek. While scholars have noted the differences between later actual existing neoliberalism and Lippmann’s text, important continuities rema...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political theology
Main Author: Kirkland, Scott (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group [2020]
In: Political theology
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Whitehead, Alfred North 1861-1947 / Neo-liberalism / Impossibility / Prognosis / Freedom
RelBib Classification:KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history
NCG Environmental ethics; Creation ethics
ZC Politics in general
Further subjects:B Sovereignty
B Walter Lippmann
B Economy
B A. N. Whitehead
B F. A. Hayek
B Neoliberalism
B Negative Theology
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:In this paper, I will investigate the relationship between aspects of Whiteheadian process thought and political theology in Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek. While scholars have noted the differences between later actual existing neoliberalism and Lippmann’s text, important continuities remain. One of these continuities is the way political boundaries police, and yet serve, economic relations. It will be argued that the unknowability of complex economic relations, thought with the help of Whitehead, gives way to a way of theoretically fencing politics and economy from one another. For Hayek, this boundary marking exercise serves to police the space of individual liberty, for it is the collectivist impulse to interfere with the unknowable and sublime object, the market, which leads to the chaos of German political life in the wartime period in which he writes. Hayek and Lippmann collapse the mystery of sovereignty into economy, and consequently legitimatise a legal architecture serving only to guard this mystery.
ISSN:1743-1719
Contains:Enthalten in: Political theology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1800197