The Visible Hand of Neo-conservative Capitalism

Abstract

Set in the context of the neo-liberalisation of capitalism, this article examines the intellectual basis of neo-conservative interventions in debates over the reformation of America's regimes of citizenship and analyses the ethico-politics enacted by those interventions. The article highlights the main axes of the neo-conservative critique of both the post-War Left and the New Right and calls attention to the extent to which this critique has translated into an expressive politics of security facilitating the rearticulation of class interests and the further advancement of market forces in the US since the late 1970s. It is argued that neo-conservative expressive security discourses are underpinned by a distinctively Schmittian rationale that transcends the traditional separation between domestic and foreign policy and aspires to a mode of political association which is fundamentally extrinsic to the liberal tradition that neo-conservatives allegedly want to reform. Unlike a number of studies published since the advent of the post-9/11 `neo-conservative moment' in American foreign policy, the analysis presented here suggests that it is not necessarily in the imperialist character of the Bush administration's foreign policy as such that the Schmittian (and Straussian) bent of the neo-conservative project can be observed but in neo-conservatism's ambivalence towards the modern liberal state and the steering mechanisms upon which the latter relies to govern the life process.