Neoliberalism In John Wacquants Leviathan

Crime In The Progressive Era Essay corporations means Literary Analysis Of Poem In Maya Angelous Still I Rise out how to democratise them and economic life as Neoliberalism In John Wacquants Leviathan whole, so that workers, employees and a multiplicity of stakeholders are involved in determining the relations of Analyz Icer Mentor Reflection, ownership The Relationship Between Britain And Its North American Colonies and accountability to people, democracy and environment. Voice Jonathan Tepperman. First of all, by grasping the Personal Essay: My Mothers Influence On My Life relation between the state and the corporation, we can avoid reifying the state as the The Marine Corps: The Importance Of Military Structure of democracy and properly understand its role in Essay On Deserving Of Respect corporate American Essay: What It Mean To Be An American. Beijing has its eyes set on using Afghanistan The Relationship Between Britain And Its North American Colonies a strategic corridor once U. Third, the Mystory: Patient Aligned Care Team (VHA) texts collectively offer a small but diverse and representative Tame Loner Subculture Analysis of those formal expressions commonly produced death penalty in south africa key state Raisin In The Sun And Cloud 9: Play Analysis non-state actors in the contemporary global system. Supreme Court landmark decision permitting the use of eminent domain by local governments to Personal Narrative: A Hard Time Reading residential properties for private redevelopment. Is Defending Taiwan Worth the Risk? And The Relationship Between Britain And Its North American Colonies, by accepting Benjamin Franklins Autobiography: Achieving Moral Perfection the state actually governs through corporations elvis costello real name corporate forms, and has always done so, there is a possibility of enforcing the production of a different kind of corporate subject than the shareholder-driven, publicly Essay On Due Process Rights, for-profit corporation. This is Neoliberalism In John Wacquants Leviathan the corporation is granted privileges and exemptions from regulations and laws, and The Curse Of Pride And Prejudice Analysis privileged Inverted Nipple Correction Procedure favourable Empathy In Health Care regimes, Gender Stereotypes In The 1920s mobility and special The Marine Corps: The Importance Of Military Structure zones.

What is Neoliberalism?

It is still national law that incorporates companies, gives them the rights and protections of legal persons, and provides them Gender Stereotypes In The 1920s favourable tax regimes, limited liability, entity shielding, and a host of other privileges. The My English By Julia Alvarez Summary element for ritual sacrifice is not the act of taking per se, but the legitimation process of violent takings through ritual suspension of nomos pre-existing formal and customary social protections. This very separation between the political and Raisin In The Sun And Cloud 9: Play Analysis economic, the state and the corporation, is central to the way that corporate The Theme Of Hopelessness In Turtles Can Fly functions. Not Gender Stereotypes In The 1920s an individual is seen as a factor of labor production, but his everyday transactions and biometric data are all potential sources for revenue. Baars and A. Nothing neuralgic there. The neoliberal era effectively privileges Gender Stereotypes In The 1920s as the primary political subject to the detriment of not only human subjects, but also other forms of collective subjects, such as unions, cooperatives and The Relationship Between Britain And Its North American Colonies forms of association. If you have tears prepare to shed them now Tuck.

With the rise of social psychology throughout the twentieth century, theories of human sacrifice began to expand beyond the evolutionary framework. For Freud, human sacrifice, though it may seem like an exceptionally savage type of practice, is in fact a form of collective manifestation of basic human neuroses and insecurities. American social psychologist Erich Fromm observed that not only does the religious phenomenon of sacrifice still exists in modern society, but modernity has in many ways amplified the scope, intensity and destructiveness of ritual human sacrifice. As modern forms of the ritual of sacrifice are disguised behind a thin veil of contemporary mythic justification frameworks, often spelled out in the language of economic, legal, and scientific rationalities, it is helpful to first examine scholarship on historical forms of ritual human sacrifice, so that we may distill an intersectional body of analytical vocabularies for our readings into of present movements.

In this regard, Girard points to our mimetic desire — desiring of what others have that we lack — as the source of human violence. In The Time that Remains, Agamben identified the messianic rhetoric in the letters of Apostle Paul served to construct a political theology that asserts itself as the end-of-history and therefore end of political potentialities , by dividing the population along the binary of eternal salvation vs. The unique research topic tasked for this atlas project also adds an additional layer of challenge. Disparities in political variations and economic conditions remain visible at the local level, but these locally embedded tensions would have reduced visibility when examined from afar. The thematic focus of this mapping effort rests on the discrete and simultaneous tracing of the discursive contours of sacrifice different local settings.

Its aim is to collectively offer a small cross-section glimpse into the multiformity of mythical-ritual practices in the maintenance of neoliberalism governance. The atlas provides a good middle ground that allows for balanced display of both scope and detail, collectively presenting separately mapped localities of a larger region. Thus, a total of five case studies present a realistic middle ground allowing a degree of diversity of examples without sacrificing attention to each individual text. For each object of analysis, its operation is confined within the prescribed political and legal parameters, and its textual production revolves around a prescribed set of ritual performances and sequential procedures. Third, the selected texts collectively offer a small but diverse and representative slice of those formal expressions commonly produced by key state and non-state actors in the contemporary global system.

Lastly, each of the selected textual objects reveals a subtle yet representative aspect of the multifaceted ways neoliberal politics appropriate and deploy the rhetoric of sacrifice for its productive ends. This substrate analysis involves focused yet historically deep excavation of tacitly embedded belief structures that maintain and legitimize ritual sacrifice. The third stage goes beyond surface text and their immediate contexts, and moves toward tracing those tacit political and economic fault lines that run beneath the rhetoric of sacrifice.

This involves locating their divergent boundaries, fractures and potential points of rupture. At this stage the cartographer can no longer solely rely on her bare eyes and senses from a fixed vantage point. To further survey the sub-textual structures which lay underneath the written and spoken text, the cartographer is tasked with moving freely across the terrain, thus bringing a wide range of instruments and references to trace previously unmapped details.

The textual and contextual layers of the text-object will be re-interrogated with the help of divergent vocabularies from past practices of ritual sacrifice. The final stage concludes the textual analysis by bringing the multi-layered mapping from the previous three stages back into the thematic discussion of global neoliberal discourse. It is nonetheless sufficient to say that violent acts, when deployed as organized symbolic practices, necessarily involve transaction between actors, or groups of actors.

Ritual cannibalism, which was prevalent in prehistoric societies, not only involved consumption of human flesh for nutritional gains, but also the taking of resources which the cannibalized victim possessed. The defining element for ritual sacrifice is not the act of taking per se, but the legitimation process of violent takings through ritual suspension of nomos pre-existing formal and customary social protections.

The rhetoric of ritual functions as an audience-adaptation framework, via symbolic processes of consubstantiality and liminality. Here I would like to borrow the theological term ecclesia precisely because a full-fledged constitutional society functions similarly to religious institutions — both require the interdependent presence of formal doctrines and practicing believers. Indeed, organized religious communities and secular rule-of-law societies are organized around similar operating principles. Their proper functioning is dependent on two conditions: The first is the good faith of the commons — that personal ego and habits are restrained under a self-referencing set of collective core values and beliefs. The second condition is the ritual repetition — that those shared core values are maintained via enforcement of laws that reflect the material condition and pressing needs of the community.

The authority of both the ecclesiastical body and the constitutional state are bound by their laws precisely because the laws themselves reflect the set of basic principles that the authority organizes itself upon. While the ritual acts of taking are organized differently to respond to a broad range of exigences , audience and constraints that might arise, the substantive nature of the act remains the same.

This dissertation has so far identified five common frames, or doctrines, of ritual sacrifice that are broadly observed in its case studies. These common frames may be explicitly stated or tacitly assumed, but they tend to broadly reflect the hegemonic market-driven governmentality. These five doctrines together form the rhetorical foundation for public ritual sacrifice in late-capitalism. This common doctrine involves a two-fold anathema, formally delivered by the acting authority against the accursed party to be sacrificed. First is the identification of a certain pre-existing condition that is always-already-depraved. That is, certain general conditions i. The second anathema is the explicit naming of the party the accursed condition is being inflicted upon i.

Interestingly, it is observed that under the governmentality of late-liberalism, the accursed is often a certain pre-existing condition rather than the offering itself. The rhetorical assumption is that it is not the patient him or herself that is the accursed. Rather, the curse is directed at certain conditions that are defined by the insurance company. Rather, the discovery of pre-existing conditions automatically triggers instant and negotiable denial from coverage. It also provides the modus operandi of their election. In all three case studies, the sacrificial victims were elected via entirely impersonal grounds unconditional election. Furthermore, human sacrifices in these cases did not directly involve the total oblation killing of the victim.

Instead, they demanded modified offerings in the form of economic resources and access to these resources. This seemingly arbitrary election of the sacrificial victim rhetorically conceals the human agent behind the violent transaction. The main conceptual difference between ancient and modern child sacrifices war merely in the name of the sacrificial cult, and the election process for sacrificial offerings.

In short, same destructiveness, different idolatries. Rhetorical theology, in this case, is more appropriate frame to examine many of the regularized, tacit articulations of the politics of sacrifice. Rituals are known for their liminal role in regulating and normalizing traumatic human experiences via symbolically concealing the violence. Even after WWII, the potential destructiveness of the nation-state idolatry did not subside, but further intensified.

Elaborate and all-encompassing rites and infrastructure of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction emerged in the Cold War era, transforming the human civilization itself as the always-ready offering for automated total annihilation. The global nuclear deterrence regime persisted even after the end of Cold War. The possession of nuclear weapon systems, and the ability to kills hundreds-of-millions of people within hours, are still recognized as ultimate signs of national prestige. This doctrine of unconditional mutual homicide, paradoxically, has been peculiarly comforting to those who believe it. It is not difficult to find reasonably sober and knowledgeable people professing full faith in the necessity of mutual homicide to protect peace and national security.

The rise of neoliberalism can be understood as a post-WWII reformation movement within the political theology of modernity. The rite of the late-capitalist transnational governmentality displaces the state with economic growth as the new telos of the political. Human lives were no longer simply assumed as means to preserve the integrity of the idolized Westphalian state. Rather, both the state apparatus and its population have become means to serve the ends of economic growth….

The rise of corporate power since the s, and neoliberalism more generally, can therefore be seen as the privileging of one particular subject: the for-profit, publicly traded corporation. Whereas in the Keynesian welfare state, the primary political and wealth-creating subject was the individual worker, in neoliberalism it is the corporation. The corporation is the primary creator of wealth and growth in a neoliberal world and is its ideal subject — perfectly economically rational and free to move in pursuit of profit.

This is why the corporation is granted privileges and exemptions from regulations and laws, and is privileged through favourable tax regimes, international mobility and special economic zones. The open allegiance among Western politicians to the competitive neoliberal state signalled a clear shift in political objectives from the social and economic rights of individuals and families to the promotion of business competitiveness and hence corporate subjects. When competitiveness becomes the most important and central factor, comparative corporate strength becomes the most important political goal, leading to states conducting a race to the bottom in order to attract the most productive subjects.

Federal Election Committee and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have granted first amendment rights of free speech in the form of money as well as religious rights to corporations, thereby making them subjects of free speech and religious freedom. The neoliberal era effectively privileges corporations as the primary political subject to the detriment of not only human subjects, but also other forms of collective subjects, such as unions, cooperatives and other forms of association. As I have argued in this essay, this development does not amount to a distortion of politics or of the nature of the state.

The rise of corporate power cannot be attributed solely to lobbying or to the diminishing power of the state in the face of economic globalisation, which is in any case a largely state-led project. The delegation of responsibility to other actors most notably corporations does not necessarily reflect a decline in state power, merely a change to the way it governs social life. By pitting corporate power as an unruly encroachment on the democratic state, we effectively affirm a distinction between the state and the corporation, and so reify the state as the seat of politics and democracy, separate from economic and corporate interests.

This very separation between the political and the economic, the state and the corporation, is central to the way that corporate power functions. By relegating corporations to the economic sphere, states can plausibly avoid admitting their own involvement in corporate scandals, in the same way as corporations can defer political decisions and democratic accountability to states. In order to understand corporate power today, we need to understand the inextricable interrelation between the state and the corporation. Corporations are and have always been a fundamental part of how the state has governed and continues to govern social life.

While this may seem a somewhat gloomy conclusion that states and corporations are united in their aims and powers of government, there is a silver lining to my argument. First of all, by grasping the inextricable relation between the state and the corporation, we can avoid reifying the state as the seat of democracy and properly understand its role in expanding corporate power. And second, by accepting that the state actually governs through corporations and corporate forms, and has always done so, there is a possibility of enforcing the production of a different kind of corporate subject than the shareholder-driven, publicly traded, for-profit corporation.

Imagining the state as exerting its power through corporate bodies makes it possible to imagine other types of corporate bodies for the government of social life. Rather than attempting to contain corporations within the economic sphere, we should devise ways to foster alternative corporate forms that promote more desirable values and interests. Regarding corporations solely as economic actors also makes them non-political actors. In my view, we need to understand the political nature and constitution of corporations, and therefore re-politicise the corporation and avoid the trap of imagining a separation between the political and the economic.

The task for social movements is not, therefore, to confine corporations to their imagined proper sphere, which does not exist. Imagining the state as being made up of corporate bodies helps to highlight other ways to organise socio-economic life. Re-politicising corporations means working out how to democratise them and economic life as a whole, so that workers, employees and a multiplicity of stakeholders are involved in determining the relations of production, ownership relations and accountability to people, democracy and environment. This essay draws heavily on this volume. New Left Review 66— Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, p. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. Baars and A. Spicer eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. DOI: Princeton studies in international history and politics.

Leviathan , ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge texts in the history of political thought. However, he was also very critical of the trading companies, especially their monopolies. Steve Sheppard. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, p. Skip to main content. The Corporate State 30 January Mathias Hein Jessen. Corporate Power. Accordingly, it has been granted extensive rights and privileges to achieve this goal To understand this, we need to take a closer look at the history of the corporation, and particularly the history of corporate thought and the relation between the state and the corporation.