Organic Neoliberalism: A.O. Hirschman’s ‘Exit Option’ and Grassroots Processes of Marketization

Abstract

The article contributes to the literature on neoliberalism by offering an alternative account of processes of marketization to those that have centred their analysis on ideological or discursive formations. Drawing on Albert O. Hirschman’s 1970 book Exit, Voice and Loyalty, it identifies a phenomenon that we might call ‘organic’ neoliberalism, proceeding from population-level decisions for ‘exit’ over ‘voice’. The perspective seeks to complement rather than to reject or displace established accounts of neoliberal marketization, whether these tend more to a Marxist focus on interested agents or to a Foucauldian emphasis on neoliberal ‘rationalities’. At the same time, it suggests a more plural understanding of the causes of marketization, helping to explain certain unresolved paradoxes and to open up hopeful possibilities for social and political futures ‘after neoliberalism’.

How are we to account for the greatly increased dominance of the market as a model of social relations over the past half century? Responses to this question are of course complex but have converged since the turn of the millennium around the concept of neoliberalism. The literature here is now extensive. Neoliberalism had already begun to emerge as an organizing concept in the early 2000s (Brown, 2003; Harvey, 2005), building on precedents in work from the 1980s and 1990s around Thatcherism, Reaganomics and ‘economic rationalism’ (Davis, 1985; Hall and Jacques, 1983; Pusey, 1991). But its use increased markedly in the period following the global financial crisis of 2007, addressing a widely felt need for critical distance from processes of marketization that have shaped the politics and culture of the early decades of the 21st century. The 2020s have seen increasing suggestions that we might now have moved beyond neoliberalism (Davies and Gane, 2021; Harris, 2025; Laruffa, 2023), but even here the concept of neoliberalism remains an important starting point in seeking to understand our highly-marketized social and cultural predicament.

There have been two opposing poles in the literature on neoliberalism. At one end, broadly Marxist, processes of marketization have been attributed to powerful agents who have stood to benefit from them in some way. An obvious example would be Harvey (2005: 16): ‘neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power’. At the other end, broadly Foucauldian, such attributions of agency have been disavowed, with attention directed instead to the rationalities that organize social relations in contexts where market models have gained an ascendancy. An example here would be Dardot and Laval’s (2017: 9) pushback against Marxist accounts in The New Way of the World: ‘In truth, there was no large-scale conspiracy, nor even a ready-fashioned doctrine cynically and resolutely implemented by politicians to meet the expectations of their powerful friends in the world of business’. At the heart of neoliberalism, for Dardot and Laval (2017: 15), has been the emergence of a new subjectivity, a development that has reshaped the very positions from which social action is possible and is therefore beyond the capacity of any agent to control.

The Foucauldian perspective has been the more influential in scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences, inspiring writing on topics as diverse as work (Moisander et al., 2018), the home (Allon, 2011), sport (Andrews and Silk, 2012), health (Lupton, 2013) and higher education (Morrissey, 2015). But there is also in the perspective a significant absence: it offers no distinct account of how or why processes of marketization have occurred. To the extent that questions of causality have been engaged, it has typically been only in a negative sense – as a refusal of simplistic or overdetermined explanations that attribute the character of social arrangements always and only to powerful agents. It has been an extension, that is, of Foucault’s (1980: 121) famous injunction to ‘cut off the king’s head in political theory’. This injunction has been in many ways enabling, displacing the moralizing tone of j’accuse styles of political theorizing and creating a space for more subtle and sophisticated description and analysis. But the cost has been a vacuum in explanation: no alternative paradigm has been provided in place of the one that has been refused.

In this article, I attempt to address this problem by outlining an alternative account of processes of marketization, one that I derive from A.O. Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty. I suggest that Hirschman draws our attention to a phenomenon we might call ‘organic’ neoliberalism. This is not a neoliberalism that is imposed by a class or other powerful agent, but one that develops more spontaneously, in countless decisions by ordinary people to opt for what he calls ‘exit’ over ‘voice’. By ‘organic’, I am wanting to refer to processes that are unplanned and whose gross effects are unintended. While the term neoliberalism is not one that Hirschman himself ever used, he developed his perspective in critical dialogue with figures such as Milton Friedman who are generally seen as close to the centre of neoliberalism. He was also clearly engaged with the wider tendencies such figures are taken to represent: the preference, in particular, for the market over other models of social relations. It seems fair, in this context, to consider the perspective for what it has to say in relation to neoliberalism.

To be clear from the outset, I am not seeking here to reject or displace established accounts of neoliberalism. While the addition of a Hirschmanian perspective may bring into question attempts at ‘total explanations’, it may actually help to strengthen more modest versions of both Marxist and Foucauldian accounts. The former, particularly, have been damaged by the appearance of a monocausal explanation. Two of their core propositions would appear undeniable: first, that there have been clearly identifiable intellectual and political movements since the early to mid-20th century that have advocated radical expansions of the model of the market; and second, that for a period of some decades from the 1980s, these movements gained significant influence across large parts of the world in major political parties, governments, corporations, bureaucracies, universities, think tanks and international agencies. Yet despite this, there has been widespread reluctance even to acknowledge that there is a positive phenomenon to be observed. As Mirowski (2018: 119) has put it, there is a tendency for those of a critical disposition to ‘circle around the word [neoliberalism] as if it were a dead animal in the middle of the road, crushed and distended, trying to figure out what to call it, even though, strictly speaking, they reserve judgment over whether it is really there’.

At a certain level, this reluctance to recognize the phenomenon may be ‘dumbfounding’ (Mirowski, 2018: 119), but it is not hard to see why it has taken hold. Given the pervasiveness of market forms in contemporary societies, the concept of neoliberalism has always been prone to over-extension. At the broadest level, the object it seeks to illuminate could be seen as nothing less than the changes that have occurred globally in politics, society and culture since the end of the Cold War. Even if we restrict ourselves to a particular aspect – the increase of market forms – it stretches credibility to suggest that these changes could be attributed to a single agency. This has left the concept of neoliberalism vulnerable to charges that it is overblown. As Peck (2013: 148) has put it, ‘the concept’s apparent promiscuity, and its ready availability as a plausible source of ultimate causality, means that it is readily prone to inflation into a blunt, omnibus category’. A major factor behind resistance to the concept has been this disconcerting tendency to hypertrophy.

The problem here might be reduced if the explanatory burden is shared. The identification of powerful agents can be valued for what it can explain rather than rejected for what it cannot, allowing a certain recuperation of Marxist accounts. But introducing a Hirschmanian perspective may also help to address problems in Foucauldian accounts. While the latter may not be accusatory, they are generally nonetheless highly critical. It is hard to read them without wishing that the effects of neoliberalism be reversed. Yet any reflection on how a reversal might be achieved cannot avoid questions of causation. This has meant that, even in work that starts from resolutely Foucauldian principles, the idea of an agency has often returned, even if only in ambiguous or refracted forms. In some cases, neoliberalism itself is instated as a historical agent. For Brown (2015), for example, ‘neoliberalism assaults the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institutions of democracy’ (p. 9), ‘neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy’ (p. 62). In other cases, an implied agency is obscured by impersonal formulations. For Dardot and Laval (2017: 18), ‘neo-liberalism is [. . .] the deployment of the logic of the market as a generalized normative logic’. The deployment, one might ask, by whom?

A Hirschmanian perspective may allow us to build on Foucauldian approaches while also addressing the explanatory vacuum at their core. The two are aligned in avoiding simple top-down accounts of processes of marketization and, as such, share some key strengths. Both avoid a merely negative or oppositional political positioning, both direct our attention to immanent relationships and processes, and both refuse a kind of magical thinking according to which we might regain a prelapsarian state simply by ‘cutting off the heads’ of neoliberal movements or ideas. But the idea of a Hirschmanian ‘organic neoliberalism’ allows us also to go further than Foucauldian accounts can do on their own. By offering an alternative account of processes of marketization, it overcomes the dilemma between an unsatisfactory explanation and no explanation, between the incitement to action on grounds that are known to be false and a renunciation of agency other than as a ‘care of the self’.

Hirschman and the Neoliberalism Literature

It should be acknowledged that Hirschman has appeared sporadically at the margins of the neoliberalism literature. He is cited by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, for example, in The New Spirit of Capitalism, their early and influential contribution to the field. Indeed, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: xxx) go so far as to dedicate the book to Hirschman, crediting him as the one whose work ‘more than any other, sustained us through this long journey’. Hirschman is also clearly an influence on Nick Couldry’s framing of neoliberalism, in Why Voice Matters, around an opposition between market logics and ‘voice’:

A particular discourse, neoliberalism, has come to dominate the contemporary world (formally, practically, culturally and imaginatively). That discourse operates with a view of economic life that does not value voice and imposes that view of economic life onto politics, via a reductive view of politics as the implementing of market functioning. (Couldry, 2010: 2)

Couldry credits Hirschman as one of the earliest to see the importance of this opposition: it was he who first ‘pointed out his fellow economists’ inattention to “voice” as a crucial dynamic in economic life in a book that, in academic circles, had considerable impact as early as 1969’ (p. 18).

References to Hirschman have gained a particular currency in recent work on the relation between neoliberalism and radical libertarian ideas more associated with the alt-right. This is in part because he has been widely cited by alt-right thinkers themselves. As Smith and Burrows (2021: 149) point out in a ‘Post-Neoliberalism’ special issue of this journal, Hirschman’s concept of exit has become a kind of talisman in the radicalized pro-market positions of figures such as Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin and Patri Friedman. Land has been ‘obsessed’ with the voice/exit distinction and all three could be seen as engaged in designing new ‘architectures of exit’. An example of the latter is Yarvin’s vision of ‘Patchwork’, in which governments would be replaced by hundreds – or even thousands – of joint-stock companies, each with exclusive control over a minute territory. The attraction of such an arrangement, for Yarvin, is that it would remove the need for politics, substituting it entirely with consumer choice: a dissatisfaction at any location could be addressed by leaving it for another. In capturing this objective, he calls explicitly on Hirschman’s paired terms: ‘The design is all “exit”, no “voice”’ (quoted in Smith and Burrows, 2021: 149).

The importance of ideas of exit to contemporary capitalism has been further explored in recent work by Raymond Craib and Quinn Slobodian. As Craib (2022) points out, they are ideas that have a much longer history than the fantasies of Silicon Valley billionaires of living in space or colonizing Mars. There are precedents in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the attempt by land developer and Ayn Rand-enthusiast Michael Oliver to establish a ‘Republic of Minerva’ on a reef in the south Pacific. These were in turn prefigured by private contract and ‘adventurist’ projects during the 19th century colonialist scramble for Africa. Slobodian (2023) focuses not so much on exit projects themselves as attempts to weaken governmental controls over territory in ways that might enable them. His book Crack-Up Capitalism could be seen as a genealogy not of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin or Elon Musk’s SpaceX Mars program but of Yarvin’s Patchwork. The precedents are found here in earlier attempts to ‘shatter the map’ of international governance through the establishment of special economic zones, city-states, duty-free districts, high-tech parks and other such enclaves. This development has enabled a pervasive ‘soft secession’: ‘We can secede by moving children from state-run schools, converting currency into gold or cryptocurrency, relocating to states with lower taxes, obtaining a second passport, or expatriating to a tax-haven’ (Slobodian, 2023: 5).

In none of this work, however, has there been a sustained engagement with Hirschman. Even in cases such as Boltanski and Chiapello – for whom he is clearly important – the references have been selective and have overlooked substantial differences between his perspective and the mainstream of debates over neoliberal marketization.

Before considering these differences, it is important first to recognize the similarities. The most obvious of these is a shared interest in the displacement of political concepts by economic concepts. An example for Hirschman is the shifting balance in the academy between economics and political science. Economists, he writes, ‘have succeeded in occupying large portions of the neighboring discipline, while political scientists [. . .] have shown themselves quite eager to be colonized and have often actively joined the invaders’ (Hirschman, 1970: 19). The observation might be seen as prefiguring Davies’ (2015: 4) idea of the ‘disenchantment of politics by economics’ or Brown’s (2015: 31) of the ‘dissemination of the model of the market to all domains and activities’, the view of human beings as ‘market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus’. Among other examples cited by Davies (2015: 21) is, indeed, an ‘aggressive economic “imperialism”’ within the academy, ‘whereby techniques that initially arose for the analysis of markets and commercial activity were applied to the study of social, domestic and political activity’.

The commonality extends to a critical view of this development. Although Hirschman was himself an economist, he sets out against the grain of his own discipline ‘to reawaken feelings of identity and pride among our oppressed colleagues and to give them a sense of confidence that their concepts too [that is, specifically political concepts] have not only grandeur, but rayonnement as well’ (Hirschman, 1970: 20). Critical writing on neoliberalism has often been marked by pessimism about the prospects of such a reversal, but there can be little doubt that a reversal itself is desired. There is, for Davies (2015: 190), ‘an obvious and necessary role for critique of neoliberalism today’. While not pretending to offer easy alternatives, he explores the ‘limits’ of neoliberalism in order to identify its weaknesses, the points that may offer openings to other possibilities. Similarly, Brown (2015: 222) sees herself as contributing to the ‘difficult project of puncturing common neoliberal sense and [. . .] developing a viable and compelling alternative to capitalist globalization’.

A further point of intersection, already mentioned, can be found in the importance given by Hirschman to the concept of voice. He uses the concept in an expanded sense, effectively as a synonym for specifically political action. It is in his early discussion of voice in Exit, Voice and Loyalty that he engages most directly with Milton Friedman. The context is the now famous proposal by Friedman to address problems in the quality of public education by issuing parents of school-age children with vouchers, allowing them to shop around between competitive providers for educational services. The idea is contrasted by Friedman to an arrangement where those seeking improvements to education have recourse only to ‘cumbrous political channels’. The contempt for political solutions in such a description is, for Hirschman, a textbook example of the ‘economist’s bias against voice’, for ‘what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of those very channels’ (Hirschman, 1970: 17). And it is by correcting against this bias that Hirschman hopes to restore some of the ballast lost from political forms of understanding. Enlarging the concept of voice emerges, then, as a key to resisting the tide of marketization.

The differences between Hirschman and the literature on neoliberalism are not over the phenomenon to be explained, therefore, nor over the motivations for addressing it; they are over the kind of explanation that is offered. These differences are clearest in his preference for disciplinary pluralism. While his rejection of economic imperialism might resonate with the critical literature on neoliberalism, there are other aspects of his work that do not. The economist, he writes, ‘is by no means alone in having a blindspot, a “trained incapacity” (as Veblen called it)’ for admitting the value of conceptualizations other than their own:

In fact, in the political realm exit has fared much worse than has voice in the realm of economics. Rather than as merely ineffective or ‘cumbrous,’ exit has often been branded as criminal, for it has been labelled desertion, defection, and treason. (Hirschman, 1970: 17)

Such lines make it impossible to recruit Hirschman as an unqualified partisan for political conceptualizations. The position he stakes out is one in which neither economic nor political conceptualizations can gain an easy advantage over the other. He seeks to moderate the ‘passions and preconceptions’ that have blinded both sides to the perspective of the other, so that we might better understand ‘how a typical market mechanism and a typical nonmarket, political mechanism work side by side’ (Hirschman, 1970: 18).

To the extent that Hirschman has been taken up in the neoliberalism literature, this pluralism has largely been ignored. It is true that in registering a threat to political understanding, the literature has posited an ‘other’ to the political, but even in doing so it has tended to code this other in political terms. For Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 42), for example, Hirschman’s exit option is to be understood as a form of critique – the ‘exit critique’ being distinguished from the ‘voice critique’. The ‘exit critique’, as they conceive it, is not a simple disengagement but an active refusal – ‘a refusal to buy on the part of the consumer or customer [. . .], a refusal of employment by the potential wage-labourer, or a refusal to serve by the independent service provider’. Similarly, Couldry (2010: 2) represents the other to voice as a discourse – the discourse that is of neoliberalism. As in the case of Boltanski and Chiapello, exit is effectively reframed as a variant of voice.

It may seem presumptuous to question such major figures as Boltanski and Chiapello over their understanding of a writer who they take to be their most important inspiration, but a close reading makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the differences are there. While Hirschman did recognize that gestures of exit may be used for political messaging – a form of ‘critique’ in Boltanski and Chiapello’s sense – he clearly distinguished such cases from what he called ‘true exit’ (Hirschman, 1970: 108). The distinction is illustrated in a discussion of the difference between ‘émigrés’ and ‘immigrants’. While the former leave their communities of origin with the intention of continued political participation from a distance, the latter do so with ‘no thought of improving them thereby or of fighting against them from the outside’ (Hirschman, 1970: 108). And it is immigrants not émigrés who properly illustrate exit.

The Concept of Exit

Hirschman’s concept of exit describes a more ordinary phenomenon than libertarian space colonies, secessionist republics or Patchwork enclaves. In its initial presentation, it appears indeed banal, merely identifying a routine mechanism in market economies by which customers interact with firms or organizations. When the quality of a product or service deteriorates, Hirschman says:

Some customers stop buying the firm’s products or some members leave the organization: this is the exit option. As a result, revenues drop, membership declines and management is impelled to search for ways and means to correct whatever faults have led to exit. (Hirschman, 1970: 4)

There is no suggestion here that exit should be understood as a form of critique. The attractions of exit are precisely that it avoids the ‘messiness’ of politics:

It is neat – one either exits or one does not; it is impersonal – any face-to-face confrontation between customer and firm with its imponderable and unpredictable elements is avoided and failure of the organization is communicated to it by a set of statistics; and it is indirect – any recovery on the part of the declining firm comes by courtesy of the Invisible Hand, as an unintended by-product of the customer’s decision to shift. (Hirschman, 1970: 15–16)

At this point, Hirschman might be seen as doing little more than spelling out the perspective of orthodox economics. His preparedness to entertain this perspective goes beyond questions of content to those of style. The early part of Voice, Exit and Loyalty reads almost like a business primer, addressing practical questions concerning the performance of firms – and, indeed, the book has had significant uptake in these terms (see, for example, Ping, 1997; Stewart, 1998).

However, the concept of exit is also joined to existential questions that can only be taken up in a very different mode. This is made clear, for example, in a late chapter on a general bias towards the exit option in the United States. Hirschman observes that ‘exit has been accorded an extraordinarily privileged position in the American tradition’, expanding with a quote from historian Louis Hartz:

The men in the seventeenth century who fled to America from Europe were keenly aware of the oppressions of European life. But they were revolutionaries with a difference, and the fact of their fleeing is no minor fact: for it is one thing to stay at home and fight the ‘canon and feudal law,’ and it is another to leave it far behind [. . .] Revolution, to borrow the words of T.S. Eliot, means to murder and create, but the American experience has been projected strangely in the realm of creation alone. (Hartz, 1955: 64–5; quoted in Hirschman, 1970: 106) ¹

The pattern at the time of European settlement was echoed, Hirschman suggests, in the settlement of the frontier. While the latter may only have involved a minority of the population at any time, it offered a ‘paradigm of problem-solving’ that could be enacted in many other ways. The size of the United States and the ease of movement within it has made it ‘far more possible for Americans than for most other people to think about solving their problems through “physical flight” than either through resignation or through ameliorating and fighting in situ the particular conditions into which one has been “thrown”’ (Hirschman, 1970: 107).

The originality of the argument here is in holding together two senses of ‘exit’ that would not normally be associated – the first, banal-business school; the second, what we might call existential-historical. It is an originality that goes beyond giving the concept of exit a novel spin. There is also, in the fusion of senses, a striking suggestion about processes of marketization. It is a suggestion that these processes unfold not only through the actions of powerful agents, but also through the everyday decisions of mass populations. To stay with the example of the United States, Hirschman (1970: 106) attributes the distinctive character of the society not only to the programs of governments and elites but also to ‘millions of decisions favoring exit over voice’. The suggestion has an immediate plausibility in relation to migration and movement – it would be hard to deny that these have been mass phenomena – but the yoking together of the senses of exit gives the suggestion a provocative extension. We are led to infer that the adoption of market forms over other models of social relations has also had a mass dimension – that it has been, to some extent, an ‘organic’ process, not simply one that has been imposed.

A key part of the argument is Hirschman’s recognition that there may be good reasons, in certain contexts, for seeking to avoid the political. One might speculate that this recognition was informed, at some level, by his own experience as a German Jew and anti-fascist partisan who ‘exited’ from Europe in the 1940s. The biographical details (for which see Alacevich, 2021) certainly lend a poignancy to his concession that exit can sometimes present an attractive alternative to what he calls the ‘heartbreak’ of voice (Hirschman, 1970: 107). But it is also worth reading Exit, Voice and Loyalty alongside a later book, The Passions and the Interests (Hirschman, 1977), which develops similar ideas at a deeper level and in a more scholarly mode. The two books should not be mapped too crudely onto each other, but there are clear continuities. Both play with paired terms for social dispositions – ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ in the first case, ‘the interests’ and ‘the passions’ in the second – and the first term in each pair is broadly aligned. Exit and the interests belong, to use Hirschman’s terms, to the ‘realm of economics’, voice and the passions to the ‘realm of politics’.

In The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman offers a history of the idea of material interests. One aspect of the argument is simply to establish that the idea has a history: it only emerged in its modern sense in the 17th century, coterminously with the development of capitalism. But the more substantial point is that there were ‘endogenous’ factors behind its emergence. It was forged, that is, in response to specific problems at the time by those who were themselves implicated within them. As with the exit option, the concept of interests gains its significance from a contrast with the political term it is paired with – in this case the ‘passions’. And as with the exit option, Hirschman makes clear why the ‘economic’ alternative may sometimes have held an attraction. He presents detailed evidence that, at the time of its emergence, the concept of interests was seen to correct against destructive consequences of allowing social relations to be ruled by the passions. While it may seem odd for us today, the idea of interests was seen as ‘softening’: ‘The passions were wild and dangerous, whereas looking after one’s material interests was innocent or, as one would say today, innocuous’ (Hirschman, 1977: 58).

Hirschman’s account of the emergence of capitalism in the 17th century provides a useful gloss on his interpretation of the intensification of market models from the middle of the 20th century. Rather than looking for a historical agent – a rising social class, to follow Marx, or, in the Weberian mode, a cultural origin or ‘spirit’ – he looks rather to a broad-based complex of responses to perceived problems in the state of affairs that preceded it. The difference in perspective is clearest in his view of 19th and 20th century critiques of capitalism as repressive and alienating:

[C]apitalism was precisely expected and supposed to repress certain human drives and proclivities and to fashion a less multifaceted, less unpredictable, and more ‘one-dimensional’ human personality. This position, which seems so strange today, arose from extreme anguish over the clear and present dangers of a certain historical period, from concern over the destructive forces unleashed by the human passions [. . .] In sum, capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature. (Hirschman, 1977: 132)

The concept of exit is informed by a similar sense of historical irony. If a Friedmanite bias towards exit is regrettable in Hirschman’s view – as anti-democratic, dogmatic, spurious in its claims to scientificity – it is a bias that can be traced, at least in part, to problems arising in the practice of voice.

Organic Neoliberalism

Hirschman’s perspective on processes of marketization lends an initial plausibility to the idea of organic neoliberalism, but the idea needs further clarification. A central question is the relation between his two senses of exit. What is the connection between withdrawal from social or political situations as a mode of problem solving and the exercise of market choice? It would be implausible to suggest that those who have opted for exit in the existential-historical sense have necessarily sought a social world organized by market relations. If there is a connection, therefore, it cannot be immediate or direct. In Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Hirschman (1970: 15–20) describes exit as the ‘impersonation’ of economics. The formulation is perhaps deliberately vague, being enough to suggest a relation between exit and market forms without specifying precisely what that relation is. Similarly, the example of the United States provides circumstantial evidence – a society formed by exit in the existential-historical sense which is also highly marketized – without spelling out how one might have led to the other.

Hirschman provides enough, however, for us to fill in stages of the argument that are missing or incomplete. It is clear that he sees the option for voice or exit as negatively determined as much as a matter of positive preference. In other words, a choice for one or the other is often taken because the alternative is in some way restricted. He suggests, for example, that we might think of voice as the ‘residual’ of exit – the option that is pursued ‘whenever the exit option is unavailable’ (Hirschman, 1970: 33). Organizations that can approximate this condition include the family, the state, the church and, in the economic sphere, pure monopolies. Restrictions on the exit option in such organizations would explain why they have often been highly politicized – arenas, that is, for the exercise of voice. In a similar way, we might see exit as the residual of voice – the option that is pursued whenever the voice option is unavailable. The obvious example here would be cases of political repression, where voice is forcefully proscribed. But we might also include political formations that have become marked by ‘heartbreak’ – where the emotional cost of exercising voice has become unacceptably high.

The important point here is that it becomes possible to account for processes of marketization without having to posit any active pursuit of these processes. The initial two stages in a chain of causation linking exit to marketization might be schematized as follows: first, the voice option becomes unavailable to certain populations – either through repression or political heartbreak; second, the exit option is taken by individuals and groups within these populations as the only one remaining. To complete the chain requires us only to recognize that, in contemporary societies, the market is the major institution facilitating exit, offering a mechanism for withdrawing from social situations without having to account for doing so. It is, to borrow Smith and Burrows’ (2021: 149) term mentioned earlier, the most available ‘architecture of exit’. This allows us then to add a third stage: a broad-based process of marketization. It is not that this process has been consciously sought; it is rather that it has precipitated out, in Hirschman’s sense, as ‘residual’.

It should be underlined that such a process of marketization is not ideological or discursive. There may be attempts to co-opt it as such, through the interpretation of exit as a variant of voice. We have already seen examples of this. On the political right, alt-right figures such as Land and Yarvin have sought to represent the option for exit as an expression of radical libertarianism. In a more banal way, public choice theorists have long seen exit, in terms attributed to American economist and geographer Tiebout (1956), as a way of ‘voting with one’s feet’ (for a recent example see Somin, 2020). On the political left, we might cite the example again of Boltanski and Chiapello’s assimilation of exit to ‘refusal’, on the model of the boycott or strike. Both right and left interpretations are, however, at odds with Hirschman’s understanding of exit. The option for exit is not a move within fields of political calculation; it is a decision precisely to withdraw from such fields.

It may help in clarifying further to compare the idea of organic neoliberalism with that of ‘everyday’ or ‘bottom-up’ forms of neoliberalism, where neoliberalism is understood as an ideology or discourse. An example would be Hall and O’Shea’s (2013) idea of a ‘common-sense’ neoliberalism to be found in contexts such as online comments by readers of the Sun. Another would be Verónica Gago’s (2017) concept of a ‘neoliberalism from below’ informing the sense-making practices of working-class communities in places such as La Salada, a large informal market on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Both respond to the gap discussed at the beginning of the article between the phenomenon to be explained (neoliberalism) and any top-down agency that could credibly account for it. The way they do so, however, is not so much to question whether there must always be an agency as to suggest that it is more distributed than top-down accounts have allowed.

The starting point for Hall and O’Shea is a Gramscian respect for the vernacular. The ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism, they suggest, ‘is not the property of the rich, the well-educated or the powerful, but is shared to some extent by everybody, regardless of class, status, creed, income or wealth’ (Hall and O’Shea, 2013: 9). Gago’s approach is more Foucauldian, but is otherwise similar in identifying neoliberal rationalities in popular culture and everyday life:

By neoliberalism from below, I am referring to a set of conditions that are materialized beyond the will of a government [. . .] The force of this neoliberalism ends up taking root as a vitalist pragmatic in the sectors that play a leading role in the so-called informal economy. (Gago, 2017: 6)

This is important work for our understanding of cultural and intellectual engagements with marketized social realities among relatively marginalized groups. It is not clear, however, that it entirely addresses the problem of explaining these realities with which we began. There are strong suggestions that bottom-up or everyday neoliberalism is secondary, emerging only in the wake of top-down processes. For Hall and O’Shea (2013: 11), it is seen as having formed after ‘forty years of a concerted neoliberal ideological assault’. For Gago (2017: 2), it has taken root in the period following the defeat of the revolutionary movements in Latin America of the 1970s – a period during which the continent ‘served as a site of experimentation for neoliberal reform propelled “from above”’.

If everyday or bottom-up neoliberalism is indeed secondary, then we have not in the end escaped a monocausal explanation. The bottom-up phenomenon is to be interpreted within a historical sequence. First, we are led to suppose, neoliberal realities were imposed ‘from above’ – in Hall and O’Shea’s case, by the Thatcherite revolution in Britain or, in Gago’s, by the Menemist economic reforms of the 1990s in Argentina. Second, and only belatedly, these realities have been inhabited ‘from below’, re-interpreted through vernacular forms of cultural expression by those on whom they have been imposed. It is possible, within such a schema, that bottom-up agency might modify what it is at first only responding to, but it is clear that any substantial transformation would, at a certain point, become a turn against neoliberalism. In the case of Hall and O’Shea, this is the very point of the Gramscian analysis: to identify the potential for such a transformation so that it might be assisted or amplified by those committed to reversing the initial ‘top down’ imposition. The implication is that there is, in the final analysis, only one causal explanation for marketization – the ‘ideological assault from above’.

The difference between the ideas of ‘bottom-up’ and ‘organic’ neoliberalism is that the former concerns dynamics internal to politics or voice, whereas the latter recognizes social processes that are external to them – reflecting the perspective that Hirschman identifies with economics. One way to sharpen the difference would be to point out that social actors might contribute to processes of marketization through everyday decisions for exit while at the same time opposing the ideological or discursive celebration of such processes. A useful analogy might be with the relation between actions and ideological commitments in the case of environmental issues such as climate change. Just as it is possible to contribute to carbon pollution while being politically opposed to a fossil fuel economy, it is possible to contribute to marketization while being politically opposed to neoliberalism. To participate in organic neoliberalism, in other words, is in no way to embrace neoliberalism as a deliberate political program.

Anatomies of Exit

Two questions in relation to the above should be addressed before concluding. The first concerns a missing piece of the puzzle in the ‘organic’ chain of causation for neoliberal marketization: what could have precipitated this chain in the first place? I have suggested, following Hirschman, that choices of voice or exit can be negatively determined. But if we are to use this principle to understand processes of marketization over the last 50 years, there is something still to explain: what problems or restrictions in voice over this period could have stimulated decisions for exit? The second question is why we should call the resulting phenomenon neoliberalism? If population level preferences for exit go back as far as 17th century settler colonialism, then why not use a more general term such as capitalism? This question may seem unrelated to the first, but the two converge on the historical context for processes of marketization since the end of the Cold War.

It should be noted that there are methodological problems in investigating exit, as the phenomenon is by its nature somewhat invisible. The decision for exit is a decision precisely to say nothing, to withdraw from a situation or organization without offering a reason or registering a protest. In tracing the causes of exit, therefore, we cannot expect to find the rich historical archive that might be taken for granted in investigating voice. Nor can much be taken from the discipline – economics – to which questions of exit are seen to belong. Exit in the sense of customer defection is typically framed in the discipline simply as a data point, not as a phenomenon in need of an explanation. In the mainstream tradition, analysis begins only when consumer dispositions are expressed in ‘revealed preferences’, to use Samuelson’s (1948) celebrated phrase. More heterodox strands such as behavioural economics may take a greater interest in consumer psychology, but this interest extends only to dispositions within fields of market relations, not to decisions over whether to participate in the market in the first place.

This is not to say, however, that decisions for exit cannot be investigated, particularly if we follow Hirschman in broadening the meaning of exit beyond its banal business school sense. Exit in the existential-historical sense has been an explicit focus in fields such as migration studies and cultural history, providing at least a starting point for attempts to understand it. And notwithstanding the relative invisibility of exit, there is evidence to work with in the historical period leading up to the neoliberal ascendancy. That period – the 1960s and 1970s – may have been a time when striking new forms of voice emerged under the broad umbrella of the New Left and the counterculture, but it was also a time in which many also chose to withdraw or ‘opt out’. It is the forms of voice that have largely been remembered – from those of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests to second wave feminism, campaigns for indigenous rights and environmental activism – but the period can also be considered for the forms of exit that it produced.

As a contemporary observer, Hirschman saw both patterns in the United States. The case of exit was illustrated for him by the hippies, who he saw as ‘very much within the American tradition’: ‘dissatisfaction with the surrounding social order leads to flight rather than fight, to withdrawal of the dissatisfied group and to its setting up a separate “scene”’ (Hirschman, 1970: 108). The case of voice was illustrated by black power, which was notable for rejecting the standard American approach to raising the status of subordinated ethnic or religious groups – an approach that sees progress ‘essentially as the cumulative result of numerous, individual, uncoordinated success stories’ (p. 109). The novelty of the black power movement, for Hirschman, was that ‘it combines scorn for individual penetration of a few selected blacks into white society with a strong commitment to “collective stimulation” of blacks as a group and to the improvement of the black ghetto as a place to live’ (p. 109).

Hirschman was not, of course, a scholar of American social movements and he was writing only from the perspective of the late 1960s. We might add to his analysis by observing that tendencies to voice or to exit can produce paradoxical countertendencies. While it may be fair to characterize the withdrawal to separate ‘scenes’ as a form of exit, for example, such withdrawals can also stimulate distinctive forms of voice within those scenes themselves. As Straw (1991) has argued in relation to music, scenes offer cultural spaces that can be enabling of creative expression. Conversely, a dedicated focus on voice can intensify the political to a point that it becomes unstable, resulting in dramatic reversions to exit. The phenomenon has been widely recognized among scholars of black power. As Joseph (2009: 776) has put it, many activists in the movement became drawn in the 1970s to ‘overblown rhetoric, polemical excess, and macho posturing’, leading to fragmentation and sectarianism. Joseph has given much of his life to affirming their accomplishments and lasting historical legacy, but he is also frank in acknowledging moments of disintegration: ‘Black power contains elements of Greek tragedy, including fratricide, incarceration, forced and self-imposed exile, mistaken identity, wrongful deaths, and decades-long political odysseys’ (Joseph, 2009: 776).

It is beyond the scope of this article to attempt a full analysis of the circumstances stimulating exit in the last few decades of the 20th century. I want only to establish that these circumstances may be relevant to the forms of marketization that we have come to describe as neoliberalism. A significant factor in some cases was clearly political repression – a factor that might suggest the opposite of any ‘organic’ process. An obvious example would be Pinochet’s Chile, where the conjunction of authoritarianism with the heady neoliberal evangelism of the so-called Chicago Boys has made it a paradigm of top-down imposition (Fischer, 2009). But even in such cases, we might distinguish between two processes: one, internal to voice, where neoliberal discourses have marginalized or displaced competing discourses; another, involving a dynamic relationship between voice and exit, where proscriptions against voice have precipitated decisions to withdraw from political competition as such. It may be tempting to conflate the two processes, as both have contributed to marketization, but the differences between them are significant for their implications and effects.

And in other cases, the circumstances behind exit appear to have been, as Hirschman would say, ‘endogenous’. Notwithstanding instances of repression in Britain, the United States and other Western liberal democracies, the decision of elements within the counterculture to ‘opt out’ was not so much a forced expulsion as an active choice. The same could be said of the centrifugal tendencies triggered by the kinds of political excess described by Joseph in the later phases of black power. While exit from the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s may have been experienced by some as imposed – Joseph mentions ‘fratricide’ and ‘forced exile’ – it is hard to see that ideological agents of marketization could be held responsible in this case. The mechanism was closer to that described by Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests, where the religious wars and intense political rivalries of 17th century Europe led, through their own internal dynamic, to a flight from the political.

The considerations here are useful in addressing the second question – about why we should call the marketization of the last 50 years neoliberalism. The question is not unique to the idea of ‘organic’ neoliberalism; it has often been asked of those who use the term in the standard way to refer to a political movement or project. The most effective answer in the latter case has been the pragmatic response of historians of ideas such as Mirowski (2018: 120), who cites Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’ between the thinkers and political agents we have come to describe as neoliberal. These resemblances are not accidental but rooted in historical contexts. They reflect a certain set of late 20th century political concerns – encapsulated in Hayek’s fear of a collectivist ‘road to serfdom’ – and a broad set of ideas as to how these concerns might be addressed – ideas that coalesced around an appeal to government as an agent of marketization. Nor is the label ‘neoliberalism’ arbitrary. Mirowski points to a history of active use in the development of the project, including by key figures such as Hayek and Friedman – notwithstanding the fact that they later preferred to disown it.

A similar pragmatic case can be made for the idea of organic neoliberalism. It might be suggested that the idea will always be parasitic on the more standard meaning. Certainly, the word neoliberalism would not have come into general use if it had not been for the intellectual lineage traced by Mirowski and others. Yet it has also gained considerable currency independently of reference to this lineage. It is widely used in a range of contexts to describe the social, political and institutional fallout of processes of marketization since the 1980s. There are obvious continuities between this fallout and longer histories of capitalism but, as in the case of the neoliberal ‘thought collective’, there are also particularities that warrant the use of a more specific term. This is, in a sense, the space that has already been marked out by Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, which regularly use the term without any specific reference to authorship or agency. The difference of the Hirschmanian perspective is only in suggesting an independent causal process.

After Neoliberalism

Where then does the addition of this perspective take us? There are a number of threads that might be taken up, but I want to focus in conclusion on the possibilities it suggests for positively addressing the marketized condition that the neoliberal moment has bequeathed. There are, admittedly, some awkward questions of temporality here. It is unclear whether we are still in the neoliberal moment, however we use the word. A case could be made that neoliberalism has become, in the 2020s, a second order problem beside political breakdown, incipient fascism, war and environmental collapse. It would be a mistake, however, to rule out neoliberalism as a problem of the past. To do so would overlook the extent to which everyday social relations are still governed by market models that have emerged since the 1980s. It would also overlook the ways in which problems past and present are entangled. If the current illiberal turn in world affairs was anticipated by anyone, it was critics of neoliberal marketization, who drew attention to the dangers, as Brown (2015) put it, of ‘undoing the demos’.

One of the first things we could take from the idea of organic neoliberalism is that the agency of ideological or discursive forms may always have been less than has generally been assumed. If marketization can be an unintended by-product of population-level options for exit, then the fact of marketization cannot be taken as evidence necessarily of the dominance of neoliberal ideologies. This may help to explain the often-remarked paradox that marketization has proceeded over the last half century despite the fact that neoliberalism as an abstract set of principles has never been popular – or even widely accepted (see, for example, Connell, 2010: 26). It would also accord with the fact that neoliberalism as a set of abstract principles has proven surprisingly fragile in the face of recent political assaults against them, both from the right and the left. While these assaults may, in some cases, be deeply problematic for other reasons, the brittleness of formal neoliberal doctrine suggests that the future is more open and contestable than appeared until recently – or than accounts of neoliberalism as a solely ideological or discursive phenomenon have often made it seem.

A second positive suggestion might be found in Hirschman’s idea of options for exit as endogenous, as it implies that processes of marketization may be reversible. If such options sometimes originate in problems of voice, rather than being driven only by exogenous factors such as a relentless march of capital, then it becomes possible to imagine a contrary process – of a return to voice in response to problems of exit. The possibility is in fact seeded by Hirschman in the inclusion of a third term, ‘loyalty’, in Exit, Voice and Loyalty. While at an abstract level the market may be organized to facilitate exit, actual relationships rarely conform entirely to this design. As Hirschman points out, market agents routinely purchase from the same supplier, work for the same employer, sell to the same customers – that is, exhibit ‘loyalty’ of various kinds – despite the fact that other more ‘advantageous’ options are open to them. As a concrete reality, as opposed to a theoretical abstraction, in other words, the market economy is not uniformly disposed to atomization and alienation, but offers opportunities for reconnection, reciprocity and returns to the principles of voice.

Finally, the immediacy of voice/exit decisions in everyday social and institutional situations suggests the availability of a terrain on which individuals, groups and collectives can work at remaking or ‘redoing’ the demos. This is not, of course, to deny that there are governmental aspects of marketization, such as deregulation or mandated commercial competition, that may be beyond the capacity of such agents to control. It is rather to question that they are the only aspects. If there has indeed been an organic dimension to neoliberal marketization, then opportunities for intervention might be found at every decision point between voice and exit, between conversation and withdrawal, between ‘staying with the trouble’ – as Haraway (2016) might say – and disengagement. While top-down impositions cannot simply be wished away, they are also not entirely determining. There are social mechanisms for reversals of marketization that are available to almost everyone.