Journal
CRITICAL HORIZONS
Volume 18, Issue 1, Pages 1-18Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2017.1275166
Keywords
Neoliberalism; Erich Fromm; social character; governmentality; ideology
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Several thinkers have expressed the view that the central nostrums of neoliberalism, including self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual risk, have become part of the common sense fabric of everyday life. My paper argues that Erich Fromm's idea of social character offers a comprehensive and persuasive answer to this question. While some have sought the answer to this conundrum in Foucault's notion of governmentality, I argue that, by itself, this answer is not sufficient. What is significant about the notion of social character, I claim, is that it manages to unify top-down approaches like governmentality focused on ideas and policy, with bottom-up approaches focused on how the insights of day to day experience are mediated through culture. Adapting this theory to neoliberalism, I argue, means that the common sense nature of neoliberalism, and the lack of a reckoning for its massive economic failure (as evidenced by the 2007 Great Recession), are explicable through the formation of a neoliberal social character, by means of which experiential processes align with cultural meanings and, subsequently, fuse with social expectations.
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