HOW CAN ONE be a neoliberal while rejecting any position called neoliberalism? Neoliberalism is not so much an intellectual position as a condition in which one acts as if certain premises were true, and others unspeakable. It’s not doctrine but a limit on the vitality of practical imagination. Acquiescing to it means accepting a picture of personality and social life that pivots on consumer-style choice and self-interested collaboration. This is the basis of the realism, so-called, that is the neoliberal trump. It implies that market-modeled activity—ticking off the preferences, going for the ask—is the natural form of life. What I meant by irony, in the sense that I criticized, was the lightly worn cynicism that is the temperamental companion to this picture of the world. This kind of irony hinted that all was not for the best, but dismissed any hope for better, all in a single gesture, a complacent shrugging that could drive one mad.

The chief, and maybe sole, task of neoliberal politics is to stand watch over the market institutions—chiefly private property, free contract, and the right to spend money however one wants—that give those bargains their home. Neoliberalism welcomes market utopianism, wherein Bangladeshi factory conditions are automatically legitimate because workers agreed to work under them; but neoliberalism won’t be pinned down to a position where such conditions are celebrated. Challenged, neoliberalism switches to the tragic wisdom of (adulterated) Burke, (exaggerated) Hume, and (pretty faithfully rendered) Hayek. It might be nice if the world were different, neoliberal realism intones, but it is what it is, and so are we. Politics is no way out because, like the market, it is just the play of passions and interests, but lacking the discipline of the bottom line. Using politics to reorder social life is the dangerous dream of the utopian engineer. To try would just set loose the selfish, vain, and ignorant on our good-enough market system. Economic waste is the best we could expect from such efforts; the worst would be piles of dead. [...]