Neoliberalism versus the market? Liz Truss,neoliberal resilience,and Lacan’s theory of the four discourses

Abstract

This article uses concepts from Lacanian discourse analysis to examine the rise and fall of Liz Truss, and to draw conclusions about the nature and resilience of neoliberalism. I begin by outlining Lacan’s theory of the four discourses in relation to neoliberalism, distinguishing a ‘neoliberal master discourse’ comprising soaring rhetoric about freedom and prosperity, from a ‘neoliberal university discourse’ grounded in economic science. I argue Liz Truss represented an unusually pure form of the neoliberal master discourse, prioritising notions of freedom and prosperity over the more pragmatic focus on austerity and market discipline. However, when Truss’ discourse failed it led not to the repudiation of neoliberalism, but rather to the return of a neoliberal university discourse of austerity developed by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt. I conclude that the relationship between the neoliberal master and university discourses is crucial to understanding the ongoing discursive resilience of neoliberalism.

Keywords

affect discourse Lacan market neoliberalism post-neoliberalism resilience

Introduction

The brief Prime Ministership of Liz Truss presents an interesting puzzle for the broad literatures on neoliberalism. The concept of neoliberalism has figured prominently in critical political economy for the past 30 years, but recently there have been increasing suggestions that the era of neoliberalism is finally drawing to a close (Gerstle, 2022; Saad-Filho, 2020). Given that the demise of neoliberalism has been incorrectly predicted many times before, most observers are hesitant to declare the wholescale end of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, following the rise of populist leaders generally ambivalent to neoliberalism, and the fiscal expansion of states across the world responding to the Covid pandemic, claims that advanced economies are finally moving into an era of ‘post-neoliberalism’ are gaining ground. As Davies and Gane (2021: 22) put it in a recent special edition on post-neoliberalism, ‘in an era of tightening national borders, escalating surveillance of biosecurity threats, and massive fiscal expansion, it is hard to classify the present political conjuncture as “neoliberal”’ (see also Wong, 2020).

The elevation of Liz Truss to UK Prime Minister was significant because it appeared to directly contradict these trends towards post-neoliberalism. In policy, manner, and even dress (King, 2022), Truss represented a very deliberate throwback to Thatcher era neoliberalism. Heavily influenced by the neoliberal thinktanks to which Truss had long-standing connections (Monbiot, 2022), her government announced an ambitious programme of tax cuts for the wealthy which had Arthur Laffer (2022) – the architect of trickledown – cheering on from across the Atlantic. Truss also promised a renewed focus on deregulation, pledging to curtail banking regulation, abolish the cap on banker’s bonuses instituted in the aftermath of the GFC, repeal environmental regulations banning fracking in the British countryside, and repeal all remaining European laws by 2024. Against tentative predications of a post-neoliberal era, it seemed we were back in the 1980s, with the Iron Lady promising she was not for turning.

The apparent second coming of Thatcherism proved remarkably short-lived, as in a turn of events that challenges our prevailing understandings of neoliberalism, the financial markets decisively spurned a neoliberal policy agenda supposedly devised to advance their interests. Truss’ mini-budget, delivered on 23 September by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, triggered a market crash, driven by concerns about unfunded promises pushing up government debt. The pound fell to its lowest level against the US dollar on record and bond yields increased significantly, driving up mortgage rates and forcing the Bank of England to enter markets to prevent flow-on effects crashing major pension funds. With financial markets rejecting Truss’ neoliberal agenda, she was forced into a series of humiliating U-turns, reversing plans to abolish the 45p tax bracket, abandoning plans to lower the corporate tax rate, and sacking Kwarteng. With her approval rate hitting −70 and opinion polls pointing to an unprecedented electoral wipe-out (YouGov, 2022), Truss resigned after only 45 days in office.

However, any hopes that the dramatic failure of Truss signalled the end of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom were dispelled when new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (2022c) promised a second era of austerity, with new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reaffirming the commitment to cutting public expenditure. Though Sunak and Hunt represent a different kind of neoliberalism – closer to the austerian neoliberalism of David Cameron and George Osborne, as opposed to the Reaganite trickledown of Truss – the evidence so far suggests their government will be broadly continuous with the previous 40 years of neoliberalism in Britain. Why then, despite the calamities of the brief Truss administration, does the United Kingdom appear to have defaulted yet again back to neoliberal business-as-usual? And what can this sorry saga tell us about the resilience of neoliberalism, and its oft-observed ability to thrive in times of crisis (see Berry, 2020; Crouch, 2011; Dellepiane-Avellaneda, 2015; Maher, 2023; Schmidt and Thatcher, 2013)?

In this article, I develop an account of neoliberal resilience informed by Jacques Lacan’s theory of the four discourses. A post-structuralist linguist and psychoanalyst, Lacan developed the conceptual apparatus of the four discourses to explain why a particular discourse remains dominant over a group of subjects. Of particular interest is Lacan’s distinction between a ‘master’ and ‘university’ discourse. A master discourse is an openly affective and emotive discourse, one which calls on the body politic to identify with a particular partisan vision or ideology. In contrast, a university discourse postures as impartial and scientific, concealing its ideological or value presumptions behind a veneer of apparent disinterested objectivity. Applying this model to neoliberalism, we can identify a neoliberal master discourse comprised of soaring rhetoric about freedom and prosperity, and a neoliberal university discourse grounded in economic science which claims there is no feasible alternative to the market.

For Lacan (2007: 148), the master and university discourses are typically woven together, with the university discourse offering an apparently impartial grounding to the more openly partisan master discourse. The rise and fall of Liz Truss is instructive because it brings into sharp focus the distinction between the neoliberal master and university discourse. Truss represented an unusually pure form of the master discourse, in which notions of freedom and the free market were entirely prioritised over the more pragmatic focus on austerity and market discipline. When Truss’ particular neoliberal configuration failed, it was immediately replaced by a return of the university discourse, with Hunt and Sunak adopting the language of fiscal prudence and respect for the putatively disinterested knowledge of the market. This pattern, in more and less obvious forms, has played out frequently across the neoliberal era. Most notably during the Global Financial Crisis, the more explicit discourse of market freedom was discredited, but in the absence of alternatives, western nations typically defaulted back to neoliberal common-sense (Maher, 2022a, 2023). To badly misquote Gramsci, we might say that when the master discourse trembles, a sturdy structure of the university is at once revealed.

To illustrate the role of the master and university discursive structures in reproducing neoliberalism, I examine the failed master discourse of the Truss administration, and its replacement by a university discourse of austerity. The first section of this article outlines Lacan’s theory of the four discourses and applies the theory to neoliberalism, illustrating with examples from historical neoliberal thinkers. The second section engages in a discourse analysis of Liz Truss’ political speeches during her Prime Ministership, demonstrating how her account of social reality was constructed using a neoliberal master discourse. The final section contrasts Truss’ discourse with the university discourse of Hunt and Sunak that emerged during her downfall. I conclude that the relationship between the neoliberal master and university discourses is crucial to understanding the resilience of neoliberalism as dominant discourse of political economy. So long as political leaders continue to speak the language of neoliberalism, we will remain in a neoliberal world.

The problem of neoliberal resilience

Though neoliberalism remains a multifarious and slippery concept, more recent literature has tended to organise critical accounts of neoliberalism into relatively coherent Marxian and Foucauldian conceptions. Marxian accounts understand neoliberalism as a class project that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s and transformed capitalism in response to declining rates of profit (Cahill, 2014; Cahill and Konings, 2017; Harvey, 2005; Van Apeldoorn and Overbeek, 2012). Adopting a largely instrumentalist account of the state, Marxists suggest the capitalist class commanded governments to dismantle the power of trade unions, reduce the rates of corporate and personal taxation, and make deep cuts to the welfare state, thereby restoring higher rates of return for capital (Van Apeldoorn and Overbeek, 2012: 4–5; see also Flew, 2014: 56–59). In contrast, Foucauldian accounts understand neoliberalism as a dominant discourse, suggesting that neoliberalism is not a straightforward exercise of class power, but rather spreads ‘more subtly, through transformations of discourse, law, and the subject that comport more closely with Foucault’s notion of governmentality’ (Brown, 2015: 47; see also Davies, 2018; Dean, 2014; Maher, 2022a). Building both on Foucault’s original account of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics and his broader theoretical oeuvre, this literature theorises neoliberalism as the expansion of the market as truth-setting regime of veridiction into every aspect of human existence (Brown, 2015: 67; Foucault, 2008: 116, 243–246; Gane, 2012: 613).

Though these two literatures have undoubtedly strengthened our understanding of neoliberalism, both encounter difficulties in accounting for the peculiarities of the brief Truss government. If Marxists understand neoliberalism as a simple class project enacted by willing politicians in the interests of the capitalist class, this perspective cannot explain why financial markets rejected so decisively Truss’ neoliberal agenda. That financial markets were so unimpressed by a policy programme largely devised by neoliberal thinktanks suggests a level of complexity in the relationship between neoliberal ideas and corporate interests that complicates a simple Marxist instrumentalist theory of the state. How to theorise the intersection of neoliberal ideas and ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ thus remains a pressing theoretical problem for Marxian accounts of neoliberalism (Cahill, 2014: 209), which struggle to explain the exact relationship between the small-state free market ideas promulgated by politicians like Truss, and the widely observed persistence of large interventionist states (for further analysis of this point see Maher, 2022b).

Conversely, though Foucauldian accounts take seriously the constitutive effect of neoliberal ideas, Foucauldian perspectives tend to be less interested in what in particular makes the discursive formation of neoliberalism so attractive and enduring, especially in light of the recurrent crises it engenders. As I have argued in more depth elsewhere (Maher, 2022a), scholars using Foucault to understand the dominance of neoliberalism often default to an implicitly instrumentalist theory of the neoliberal state to explain the persistence of neoliberalism (see, for example, Davies, 2018), a theoretical move that undercuts the post-structural impulses of Foucault’s own discursive account of neoliberalism. Furthermore, if the Foucauldian genealogical endeavour is to trace the origins of neoliberalism, to show that it is arbitrary and contingent, and always could have been otherwise, Foucauldian perspectives inevitably have less to say on the question of why neoliberalism remains dominant relative to other discourses, and it is on this question that the Lacanian approach to discourse analysis has the most to offer (Eberle, 2019; Solomon, 2015; Tolis, 2023; Wilson, 2014a).

The Lacanian theorisation of neoliberalism I develop in this article does share many similarities with Foucault’s original account of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, most notably in foregrounding the discursive constitution of neoliberalism, and in understanding neoliberalism as constructing, rather than capturing, subjects and institutions. Where the Lacanian theorisation departs, and is especially useful in theorising neoliberal resilience, is in using the tools of psychoanalysis to explicitly foreground questions of desire and affect. As Solomon (2015: 1) notes, the Lacanian approach to discourse analysis addresses the crucial question ‘why are some discourses more politically effective than others’. In contrast to Foucault, Lacan’s (2007: 189) psychoanalytical approach directly engages questions of how a particular discourse ‘hooks on’ to its subjects, and why it remains dominant over that speaking subject despite the discourse’s apparent failings (for a similar account of choosing Lacan to supplement Foucault see Wilson, 2014b; see also Butler, 2000: 151; Epstein, 2016; Maher, 2023). By utilising psychoanalytical concepts such as desire and fantasy, a Lacanian discourse analysis can help explain what it is in particular about neoliberalism as discourse that has allowed it to remain dominant in spite of its repeated failures. Here, the Lacanian approach can engage fruitfully with existing literature exploring the history of neoliberal thought, expanding on the affective dimensions of neoliberalism already documented by historians of neoliberal thought such as Jessica Whyte (2019) and Quinn Slobodian (2018, 2023) (see also Callison and Manfredi, 2019).

Finally, a Lacanian theorisation of neoliberalism is also well-suited to theorising the ruptures and continuities of neoliberalism in the period following the Global Financial Crisis. In offering the outlines of a Lacanian account of neoliberalism, I foreground Lacan’s (2007) four discourses, a theoretical heuristic originally developed by Lacan to understand both the ruptures and continuities of the failed Paris uprising of 1968. Observing the aftermath of the uprising, where the student’s originally successful discourse of revolution ultimately failed to displace President Charles de Gaulle’s nationalist discourse, Lacan developed the conceptual apparatus of the four discourses to explain why a particular discourse remains dominant over a group of subjects. The four discourses describe four different forms of subjectivity – that of the master, the university, the hysteric, and the analyst – and understanding the dynamics, attraction, and failings of these different forms of subjectivity can help account for how a particular discourse becomes dominant. As Lacan (2007: 207) claimed, ‘what I am trying to spell out, because psychoanalysis gives me the evidence for it, is what dominates (society), namely, the practice of language’. Thus, the Lacanian schema I outline in the following section offers a novel framework through which to understand the ruptures, continuities, and ongoing affective potency of contemporary neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism and Lacan’s theory of the four discourses

Like other post-structuralist approaches to discourse analysis, Lacanian discourse analysis generally eschews a single prescriptive methodological approach (Parker, 2014: 38; Tolis, 2023: 7). In general, Lacanian discourse analysts foreground questions of desire and affect, examining the ways in which dominant discourses offer narratives and subject positions that smooth over existing social and political dislocations (see Neil, 2013; Parker, 2005; Solomon, 2015). Also central to the existing field of Lacanian discourse analysis is Lacan’s theory of the four discourses (Eberle, 2019; Fink, 2017; Solomon, 2015; Žižek, 1998). As Tolis (2023: 2) notes, the ‘four discourses can be used as mind maps enabling us to reflect on any produced fractures and ultimately assess whether they can challenge and potentially subvert a given discourse’. In examining the fractures and ultimate persistence of neoliberalism as discourse, I therefore foreground the conceptual framework of the four discourses. Lacan’s (2007) four discourses are theoretically complex, and the explanation here is necessarily parsimonious – I leave out the quasi-algebraic formulation Lacan originally used in describing the four discourses in his Seminar on the Other Side of Psychoanalysis (for detailed explanation see Bracher, 1994; Fink, 2017; Solomon, 2015). In the following section I focus on the first two discursive forms enunciated by Lacan – the discourse of the master, and the university – returning to the remaining discourses – the discourse of the hysteric, and the analyst – in the conclusion. In introducing the master and university discourse, I illustrate how these theoretical frameworks can be used to understand the dominant discursive forms of neoliberalism.

The master discourse

The first of Lacan’s four discourses is the master discourse, a discourse characterised by the dominance of a master signifier over a group of subjects. For Lacan, master signifiers are those signifiers that are so widely used that they can essentially come to mean anything – terms like ‘the people’, ‘democracy’ or ‘the will of God’ (Hook and Vanheule, 2016). A master signifier halts ‘the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification’ (Lacan, 2006: 681) through the simple act of pointing only to itself, providing a temporary Archimedean point around which a discourse can be structured. A discourse structured around a master signifier calls on the responding subjects to identify with and assimilate into the master’s discourse. In exchange for the subject’s obedience to the call of the master, the master discourse promises a fixed and coherent identity for the subject. Like all forms of subjectivity, that offered by the master is ultimately lacking and divided, but in presenting its discourse the master attempts to conceal its own shortcomings (Solomon, 2015: 53). As Lacan (2007: 103) highlights, ‘acting the master is to think of oneself as univocal. And surely it is psychoanalysis that leads us to say the subject is not univocal . . . [The master discourse] by virtue of its very structure, masked the division of the subject’.

When a master discourse has become hegemonic, the effect is that the subject fully identifies with the master signifier, believing that through their identification, they have posited a complete and fixed form of subjectivity. As Žižek (1998: 76) opinions, ‘what characterizes the Master is a speech-act that wholly absorbs me, in which “I am what I say”, in short, a fully realized, self-contained performative’. An instructive example of a master discourse is that of monarchy. In accepting ‘the King’ as master signifier, the Other recognises the King as a complete subject, worthy of obedience and loyalty by the King’s very nature. By accepting a position of subservience to the King, the speaking subject can posit their identity as part of a fixed and meaningful whole, defined by their relation to the apex of the discursive structure, the King. Similarly, recently resurgent populist-nationalist discourses also often take the form of the master discourse, in which the responding subject identifies with the fantasy of nationalist renewal (Mandelbaum, 2020).

Applying the master discourse framework to neoliberalism, we can identify a neoliberal master discourse structured around such master signifiers as freedom, the market, order, prosperity, and growth. Historically, we can locate the emergence of the neoliberal master discourse in the works of neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman, who claimed in his widely read body of work that only the free market could deliver freedom (Friedman, 2002: 2–3, 9), order (Friedman and Friedman, 1980: 13), and prosperity (Friedman, 2002: 199–200). As Friedman put it, extoling the success of the free market in the United States:

the United States has continued to progress; its citizens have become better fed, better clothed, better housed, and better transported; class and social distinctions have narrowed; minority groups have become less disadvantaged; popular culture has advanced by leaps and bounds. All this has been the product of the initiative and drive of individuals co-operating through the free market (Friedman, 2002: 199–200)

The strongest exemplar of the neoliberal master discourse was developed by Austrian school neoliberal thinkers, who emphasised the stark discursive antagonism between the pure free market and the destructive, interventionist state. For example, the work of economist Ludwig Von Mises is notable for its particular vehemence towards the state, with Von Mises (1998: 715) claiming that ‘the essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning’, and that ‘it is one step only from such a [statist] mentality to the perfect totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler’ (Von Mises, 1969: 76). Demonstrating the binary constructions typical of the master discourse, Von Mises (1969: 10) claimed that ‘there is no middle way, no third system possible as a pattern of a permanent social order. The citizens much choose between capitalism and socialism’. In a contribution illustrative of the reverence with which the free market was treated in the Austrian school neoliberal discourse, Leonard Read (1950: 23) elevated the free market to the position of epistemological deity, claiming that ‘value, it has been conclusively proven, can be determined only by free market processes’. Austrian school thinker Benjamin Rogge (1979: 53–54) takes the worship of the market even further, using transcendental and quasi-theological tones to explicitly equate the free market with the ‘God-head’, suggesting that:

The free market cannot produce the perfect world, but it can create an environment in which each imperfect man may conduct his lifelong search for purpose in his own way . . . This freedom is what it means to be a man; this is the God-head, if you wish. I give you, then, the free market, the expression of man’s economic freedom and the guarantor of all his other freedoms (Rogge, 1979: 53–54).

For the analyst observing Rogge from outside the confines of the discourse, the hyperbolic modality recalls Žižek’s (1998: 101) archetype of the ‘“overconformist” authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it’. Hence, taken purely on its own, the master discourse might struggle for credibility. Crucial though to the success of neoliberalism as dominant discourse is a second form of discursive structure which supports and offers legitimacy to the master discourse, namely, the discourse of the university.

The university discourse

The second discursive structure within Lacan’s framework is the discourse of the university. Lacan (2007: 148) suggests that the university’s function is the elucidation of the master discourse, which the university discourse achieves by presenting the assertions of the master discourse in the form of supposedly objective, neutral knowledge (Boucher, 2006: 276–277; Fink, 2017: 33–34). While the master discourse is explicitly partisan, claiming that a particular master signifier offers the best resource for structuring signification, the university discourse presents its claims as a form of shared common sense, functioning ‘as an avatar of the master discourse, promulgating master signifiers hidden beneath systematic knowledge’ (Bracher, 1994: 117). Hence, though the master signifier might be absent from the explicit content of the discourse, it retains an implicit ordering function which grounds the university discourse. As Lacan (2007: 104) notes, knowledge ‘occupies the dominant place in that it is this place of the order, the command, the commandment, this place initially held by the master . . . (but) one finds nothing else at the level of its truth than the master signifier’. Although the discourse of the university is present in the institution of the university, its form also exists outside the boundaries of the formal university. The discourse of the university is present whenever the speaker seeks to convey their claims as value-neutral common sense, justified by supposedly universal scientific principles. For example, Lacan (2007: 206) suggested that in its official doctrine of scientific socialism, the Soviet Union presented a perfect model of the university discourse, in which communism was justified not by recourse to normative argumentation, but rather based on supposedly objective science.

In addition to the master discourse constructed around the free market, neoliberal thinkers also created a form of free market advocacy that was structured according to the model of the university discourse. Largely taking place within the discipline of economics, neoliberal thinkers sought to present their ideas as scientific common-sense, devoid of ideological or normative content. The most important contribution here was Milton Friedman’s Essays in Positive Economics, published in 1953. Friedman established a strong binary distinction between ‘normative’ economics, which adjudicated between the different ends a society should pursue, and ‘positive’ economics, which empirically determined the outcomes of different economic policies. In a discursive move that would strongly characterise the neoliberal university discourse, Friedman (1953: 5) claimed that both supporters and opponents of the free market shared the same ends – a free and prosperous society – but differed only in their economic understanding of how to achieve their goal:

differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predications about the economic consequences of taking action – differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics – rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight.

Accordingly, Friedman claimed that his policy preferences were derived not from normative value judgements, which could be interrogated and rejected by a democratic citizenry, but rather were objective and value-neutral conclusions derived from empirical evidence and scientific experimentation. Friedman was responsible for establishing a strongly positivist method within the Chicago school of economics, which allowed neoliberal thinkers to posture as detached and rational (overwhelmingly) men of science. Conversely, from their position of considered empiricism, neoliberals could construct their opponents as hopeless idealists who failed to understand that their interventionist actions would only harm the people they wished to help. For example, responding to a critical essay in the Wall Street Journal by Alexander Cockburn which claimed that ‘Mr. Friedman speaks unequivocally on behalf of the capitalist class and for that class’, Friedman defended himself by posturing as a detached, impartial scientist, guided not by capitalist values but by universal mathematical conclusions:

The function of scholarship is to try to find out what’s true, what works, and fundamentally the kind of scholarship I have done in my opinion has no ideological quality whatsoever. Nobody who has ever looked at my work is going to accuse me of being a hired minion of the capitalist class (Friedman, cited in Peterson, 1986).

The distinction between the neoliberal master and university discourse is illustrated by a conflict between Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler regarding the correct discursive style of free market advocacy. In 1946 Friedman and Stigler published a short policy pamphlet on the problem of rent control. Utilising the university mode of discourse, Friedman and Stigler (1946: 22) argued that ‘our objectives are the same as yours: the most equitable possible distribution of the available supply of housing and the speediest possible resumption of new construction’. The authors proceeded to argue that based on empirical evidence, rent control actually reduced access to housing, and that the best solution for everyone was to allow the free market to allocate housing resources. In a critique of the pamphlet, Rand (cited in Snow, 2011) called it ‘the most dreadful thing ever put out by a conservative organization’, describing Friedman and Stigler as ‘two reds’. The essence of Rand’s critique was that the pamphlet did not begin from the premise that individual freedom must always be prioritised over government intervention. Rather, Rand claimed that Friedman and Stigler’s positivist method conceded that, if it could be proven that government intervention is more efficient, government intervention should be permitted. Writing from within the confines of the master discourse, Rand could not accept even the possibility that the free market should be interrogated to determine its efficacy. In contrast to the university discourse, the master discourse starts from the explicit premise that the free market is always preferable to any alternative, and therefore is not amenable to empirical examination. However, it is also important to note that the neoliberal master and university discourses do overlap significantly. Figures such as Milton Friedman were able to transition easily between the two forms of free market discourse, often depending on the particular audience he was addressing. Thus, the neoliberal university discourse developed principally to support and reinforce the neoliberal master discourse. Crucially, the university discourse allowed neoliberal thought to colonise most of the economics discipline, and to dominate discussions of economic policy, strongly contributing to the hegemony of the neoliberal discourse established in the 1980s.

Truss and the neoliberal master discourse

In the previous section, I explained that the master and university discourses typically overlap, with the university discourse providing a solid grounding to the more idealist claims of the master discourse. As I noted in the introduction, Liz Truss was unusual because her account of the political was constructed almost entirely within the framework of the master discourse. In this section, I elucidate the structure of Truss’ neoliberal master discourse, and demonstrate why a master discourse unmoored from the groundings of a university discourse struggles to remain hegemonic in the face of political challenges. My analysis of Truss’ discourse is based on a close reading of the 33 significant speeches and press releases delivered by Truss during her Prime Ministership, drawn from the UK Political Speech archive, and is supplemented by analysis of the transcripts of the Conservative Party leadership debates and other television interviews. The unusually short tenure of Truss allows for a comprehensive reading of her entire body of political speeches. From my close reading, I identify the key master signifiers used by Truss – principally, the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘growth’ – and illustrate their structural functioning within Truss’ discourse. I also highlight the key antagonisms and enemies constructed within her master discourse. Finally, in the following section I contrast Truss’ discourse with the speeches delivered by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt on assuming their respective leadership positions, demonstrating how the neoliberal university discourse constructed by Sunak and Hunt was deployed to smooth over the ruptures and contradictions created by Truss’ failed master discourse.

Liz Truss first entered parliament in 2010 and immediately established connections with organised neoliberal thinktanks, working with the Institute for Economic Affairs to create the ‘Free Enterprise Group’, a grouping of Thatcherite Conservative MPs. In 2012 Truss and other members of the Free Enterprise Group co-authored Britannia Unchained, a free market manifesto that claimed the United Kingdom was ailing from a ‘bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation’ (Kwarteng et al., 2012: 37), and needed to embrace neoliberal reforms including deregulation, more flexible labour markets and cuts to the public sector. While rapidly ascending through a range of ministerial positions, Truss (2021) gained a reputation as a leading neoliberal voice within the Conservative party, admitting ‘I’m probably one of the more ideological among my colleagues, in that that’s what motivates me’. Truss (2019a) emphasised the need ‘to convey the idea of lifestyle freedom’ to the next generation of voters, claiming that a generation of ‘Uber-riding, Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters’ should naturally embrace the ideals of economic liberalism (Truss, 2019b). Following Boris Johnson’s resignation in July 2022, Truss emerged as one of the front-runners in the Conservative leadership contest, eventually defeating rival Rishi Sunak by a margin of 15% in the final vote of Conservative party members.

Both during the leadership campaign, and after ascending to the role of Prime Minister, Truss articulated a neoliberal vision using the structure of the master discourse, foregrounding ‘freedom’ and ‘growth’ as the master signifiers of her discourse. In a discursive move characteristic of the master discourse, Truss claimed that a belief in freedom was not merely her personal belief, but was rather a characteristic of the British people to which she was giving form. In her first speech after winning election to PM, Truss (2022b) claimed ‘I know that our beliefs resonate with the British people – our beliefs in freedom, in the ability to control your own life, in low taxes, in personal responsibility’. Truss (2022c) reinforced the point in her first official speech as PM, declaring ‘what makes the United Kingdom great is our fundamental belief in freedom, in enterprise, and in fair play’. Truss (2022f) linked the more abstract belief in freedom to a more specifically neoliberal vision of a low-taxing low-spending state, claiming ‘We want people to keep more of the money they earn, so they can have more control over their lives and can contribute to the future’. In contrast to more technocratic neoliberal discourses that favour a small state on the grounds of efficiency, Truss (2022h) explicitly foregrounded the moral dimension, claiming ‘Cutting taxes is the right thing to do’, adding ‘when the government plays too big a role, people feel smaller’. Truss’ (2022h) desire for ‘sound money and the lean state’ was thus grounded in the ‘belie[f] that you know best how to spend your own money, to get on in life and realise your own ambitions . . . It is a belief in freedom, in fair play and the great potential of the British people’.

The second master signifier that stands out in Truss’ discourse is economic growth, with Truss (2022h) telling the Conservative party conference ‘I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth’. Rather than treating economic growth as merely an economic metric, Truss (2022i) situated growth in a personal language of affect, adding ‘my conviction that this country needs to go for growth is rooted in my personal experience. I know what it’s like to grow up somewhere that isn’t feeling the benefits of growth’. Cementing the functioning of growth as a self-referential end point, Truss (2022a) added ‘I believe in a growing economy and a growing economy actually brings in more growth in the future’. Here Truss’ use of the term growth perfectly illustrates the role of the master signifier as the ‘final guarantee of meaning . . . able to halt the process of referral by the empty gesture of referring only to itself’ (Gunkel, 2014: 191). Truss’ construction of growth as master signifier was also sufficiently broad as to allow the responding audience to map their own aspirations onto the concept of growth, with Truss (2022h) claiming ‘fundamentally, growth helps people fulfil their hopes and their dreams’. If the listeners accept Truss’ master discourse, they connect their own hopes and aspirations to Truss’ promise of growth, thereby accepting Truss’ (2022d) neoliberal plan for ‘growing the economy in a Conservative way by cutting taxes and slashing red tape’.

Related to the concept of growth in Truss’ master discourse was a strongly positive construction of business and corporations. In contrast to more typically technocratic pro-business discourses that emphasise the structural necessity and job creation of corporations, Truss (2022h) used an affective language charged with emotion, declaring ‘I love business. I love enterprise. I love people who take responsibility, start their own businesses and invest’. Truss’ (2022f) ‘unashamedly pro-business’ vision also extended to banks, with Truss adding ‘we want the City to be the most competitive place for financial services in the world’, and ‘when we unblock capital, that capital will be used across the UK to make every industry become more productive and competitive’. As part of her commitment to capital, Truss promised to remove the cap on banker’s bonuses introduced by the EU in the aftermath of the GFC. Notably the removal of the cap had not been lobbied for by the banks, with bankers suggesting the removal of the cap would have little impact on pay structures (Makortoff, 2022). Accordingly, the abolition of the cap must be understood as a highly symbolic gesture, intended to convey ‘that we are a country that is pro-business, pro attracting investment into our economy’ (Truss, 2022e). That the cap had initially been imposed by the EU also allowed Truss to draw on pre-existing affective connections associated with Brexit, linking deregulation to the broader claims of sovereignty and freedom (see Berry, 2020; Mandelbaum, 2020). As Truss (2022h) put it, ‘by the end of next year, all EU-inspired red tape will be history. Instead, we will ensure regulation is pro-business and pro-growth’.

The final dimension of the master discourse evidenced by Truss was a political approach that emphasised antagonism and confrontation. Whereas a university discourse might emphasise commonality, and treat opposing political views as well-meaning but ultimately misguided, a master discourse constructs enemies, denying the legitimacy of political opponents. Truss clearly adopted the master discourse approach, claiming her opponents were opposed to freedom, growth, and Britain itself. In an early illustration of her antagonistic approach, Truss refused to appoint any supporters of her leadership rival Sunak to her cabinet (Turner, 2022). Truss’ key Conservative Party Conference speech focused on constructing an enemy, with Truss (2022h) describing an ‘anti-growth coalition’ determined to ‘hold us back’ by opposing her neoliberal plan for growth. Reflecting the binary logic of the master discourse, Truss (2022h) collapsed all her opponents into this one group, claiming the anti-growth coalition comprised of ‘Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP . . . the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think-tanks . . . the talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion’. Truss (2022h) claimed that the anti-growth coalition ‘favoured more taxes, more regulation and more meddling’, and that rather than simply holding different political views, these people were opposed to Britain itself – ‘they don’t understand the British people. They don’t understand aspiration . . . We will be proudly pro-growth, pro-aspiration and pro-enterprise’.

Truss’ account of the economy and society more broadly was thus constructed almost entirely within the structure of a master discourse, eschewing pragmatism and caution in favour of the single-minded pursuit of freedom and growth. Though Truss’ discourse was successful in winning the support of the Conservative Party membership, it almost immediately encountered difficulties when the vagaries of the financial markets diverged from Truss’ vision – in Lacanian terms, what we might call the ‘incessant sliding of the signified under the signifiers’ (Lacan, 2006: 419). Whereas a university discourse can evolve in response to new evidence or events, a master discourse cannot backdown in the face of what has previously been constructed as mortal enemies and existential threats. Accordingly, when the mini-budget crashed financial markets and led to precipitous declines in opinion polls, Truss could not reverse course without chronically undermining her position. Initially, Truss attempted to channel Margaret Thatcher and insist she was ‘not for turning’. In a BBC interview on 2 October, Truss (2022g) reiterated her commitment to the importance of the mini-budget, saying ‘I do stand by the package we announced, and stand by the fact that we announced it quickly because we had to act’, and that she was ‘absolutely committed’ to abolishing the 45p tax rate. On 3 October, Truss abandoned plans to cut the 45p tax rate, the first in a series of humiliating policy reversals that destroyed any semblance of credibility. Truss’ master discourse lacked the rhetorical tools to justify the dramatic reversals, making her position as Prime Minister untenable, and forcing her to resign as her construction of the political crumbled.

Sunak, Hunt, and the neoliberal university discourse

The neoliberal master discourse of Truss can be contrasted to the neoliberal university discourse developed by current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Sunak was Truss’ chief rival during the original leadership contest, and across the contest constructed a more pragmatic account of the economy using the structure of the university discourse. In the leadership debate Sunak (2022a) claimed Truss was offering ‘something-for-nothing economics’ and a ‘short-term sugar rush’, adding ‘this something for nothing economics isn’t Conservative. It’s socialism’. Using the university discursive trope of presenting opponents as well-meaning but naively misguided, Sunak (2022a) told Truss ‘We have to be honest, borrowing your way out of inflation isn’t a plan, it’s a fairy tale’. Against Truss’ rhetoric of freedom and tax relief, Sunak (2022b) postured as rational expert concerned for the future, saying

Conservatism is about being pragmatic and that has long been a tenet of our party . . . But what I won’t do is pursue policies making inflation worse and last far longer – especially if those policies simply amount to tens and tens of billions of pounds, putting them on the country’s credit card and asking our kids and grandkids to pick up the tab.

Here Sunak was reproducing a narrative around the threat of government debt originally developed by former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron’s election victory in 2010 combined a neoliberal master discourse that emphasised freeing society from reliance on the state and building ‘the big society’ (Clark and Newman, 2012; Stanley, 2014), with a neoliberal university discourse which claimed excessive government debt had become unsustainable, and austerity policies the only pragmatic solution (Berry, 2016: 69–85; Gamble, 2014). Accordingly, Sunak sought to reactivate the affective imageries surrounding austerity originally created by Cameron, with Sunak particularly foregrounding the university notions of necessity and no alternative, but also to a more limited extent drawing on vocabularies from the neoliberal master discourse around preserving freedom and national unity in the face of fiscal challenges. For example, on assuming the Prime Ministership Sunak (2022c) warned of ‘difficult decisions to come’ in his attempt to restore ‘economic stability and confidence’, but like Cameron promised to bring ‘compassion to the challenges we face today’ and to ‘not leave the next generation, your children and grandchildren, with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves’.

Sunak’s insistence on the importance of fiscal responsibility and warnings around government debt also appeared to be vindicated by the failure of Truss’ mini-budget. The perceived catastrophic failure of the mini-budget centred largely on the reactions of markets, and in this regard indicates another important mode by which neoliberal notions of truth persist. In citing the reaction of markets, politicians, and media figures invoked a supposedly neutral arbiter of economic truth which had judged Truss’ policies as economically harmful. What this invocation of the market as truth arbiter conceals is that the reactions of markets are based not on neutral economic truth, but rather on the perceptions of investors, which are in turn guided by a particular set of ideological beliefs about the nature of the economy and its response to government policies. As Žižek (2008) reminds us, it is precisely when a claim of post-ideological objectivity is made that we should be most aware of the functioning of ideology, concealed by the veneer of pragmatic realism. In urging Truss to put aside ideology and do what the markets deemed necessary, her critics were helping to construct a new economic reality structured according to the neoliberal university discourse, in which fiscal prudence and therefore a return to austerity was the only ‘sensible’ choice available to the government.

The neoliberal university discourse was also adopted by new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who replaced the sacked Kwarteng on 14 October. Seeking to project pragmatism and common-sense in the face of crisis, Hunt (2022c) told parliament that ‘instead of being ideological I am going to be practical’. In his Autumn Statement delivered on 16 November, Hunt (2022c) signalled a return to austerity, promising ‘a rock solid commitment to rebuild the public finances’, adding ‘British families make sacrifices every day to live within their means and so too must their government because the United Kingdom will always pay its way’. Hunt (2022a) also openly repudiated his predecessor, saying that ‘at a time when markets are rightly demanding commitment to sustainable public finances, it is not right to borrow to fund this tax cut’. Here ‘markets’ are in position of truth-setter, concealing the particular (neoliberal) ideological beliefs in fiscal prudence that guided Hunt’s turn to austerity, instead presenting it as an inevitable response to the objective dictates of the market. As Žižek (1998: 78) puts it, ‘the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things’. Reflecting another discursive trope of the university discourse, Hunt (2022c) also emphasised the complexity of the economic and financial situation, warning that ‘anyone who says there are easy answers is not being straight with the British people’ and highlighting his ‘difficult decisions on taxing and spending’.

The university discourse also allows a certain flexibility not possible within the more partisan master discourse, and hence Hunt could introduce measures contrary to a more libertarian or purer form of neoliberalism. While still reaffirming a commitment to more traditional neoliberal values associated with the master discourse such as freedom and limited taxation – ‘as Conservatives we do not leave our debts to the next generation’ and ‘Conservatives know that high tax economies damage enterprise and erode freedom’ (Hunt, 2022c) – Hunt could also make concessions to the unpopularity of Truss’ mini-budget, not only maintaining the 45p tax rate but also reducing the threshold at which it applied from £150,000 to £125,140. The modest measures to increase taxation on the wealthy provided the ideological cover necessary for the accompanying cuts to public expenditure, with Hunt (2022b) insisting he would ‘take the difficult decisions necessary to ensure that there is trust and confidence in our national finances. That means decisions of eye-watering difficulty’. Related to Hunt’s projection of credibility was his emphasis on the importance of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The OBR was originally created by Conservative Chancellor George Osborne as an independent body monitoring and reporting on fiscal policy, providing an apparently scientific grounding to claims about a government debt crisis, and de-politicising Osborne’s decisions to cut government expenditure. Truss and Kwarteng had notably snubbed the OBR, refusing to allow the OBR to complete an independent evaluation of their mini-budget because they believed the OBR would reject their claim that tax cuts would stimulate high levels of future economic growth. In contrast, Hunt (2022b) immediately asked the OBR to create forecasts for his Autumn statement, and emphasised the importance of the OBR in rebuilding economic credibility, telling parliament

I fully support the vital independent roles that both institutions [the OBR and Bank of England] play, which give markets, the public and the world confidence that our economic plans are credible and rightly hold us to account for delivering them.

An independent institution constructed on the basis of austerian ideology was thus the perfect body to support Hunt’s neoliberal university discourse, with its forecasts and general fiscal outlook providing an apparently scientific grounding to Hunt’s claims that deep spending cuts were an economic necessity.

Conclusion

This article has argued that Lacan’s theory of the four discourses can help explain the ongoing resilience of neoliberalism as dominant discourse of the economic. In focusing on the Prime Ministership of Liz Truss, I have emphasised the relationship between the neoliberal master and university discourses, suggesting that even when the master discourse fails, the epistemological dominance of the neoliberal university discourse forecloses the possibility of alternatives. In responding to the crisis caused by Truss’ dramatic failure, Sunak and Hunt foregrounded the university discourse in their account of the economic, projecting stability and common sense, while making more limited usage of neoliberal master signifiers like freedom and growth. In concluding, I want to briefly note the remaining two discourses theorised by Lacan, namely, the discourses of the hysteric and the analyst. For Lacan, a hysteric’s discourse is one that directly challenges the master discourse, calling the master to account for its failure to make good on its promises. As Fink (2017: 34) puts it, the hysteric ‘goes at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge’. Nevertheless, by addressing its discourse to the master, the hysteric still affirms a relationship of authority, and creates a form of subjectivity which cannot escape from the dominance of the master (Bracher, 1994: 122–123). In the context of neoliberalism, many of those contesting neoliberalism – including politicians, activists, and scholars – have tended to adopt a hysteric’s discourse, critiquing the effects of neoliberalism, but still implicitly accepting the validity of neoliberal terms of analysis. For example, as I have shown elsewhere, critics of neoliberalism frequently reproduce the neoliberal analytical binary of ‘the free market vs the state’, reversing the valence attached to the terms, but still accepting their existence and thereby inadvertently sharing in the work of transcribing these constructs into our social reality (Maher, 2022a, 2023). Critics of neoliberalism therefore help to naturalise the neoliberal account of reality, ensuring that neoliberal master signifiers like the free market and economic growth are widely viewed not as aspects of neoliberal ideology, but rather as concrete objects in the world. The pervasiveness of neoliberal ontological presumptions even in the worldview of its purported critics remains a key aspect of the dominance of neoliberalism.

What is lacking, from a Lacanian perspective, is a discourse of the analyst. In the analyst’s discourse, the responding subject is encouraged to approach ‘the hole from which the master signifier arises’ (Lacan, 2007: 189), and rather than attempting to cover up their lack through identification with various master signifiers or through critique of the master, to instead develop their own master signifiers. To move beyond the hysteric’s discourse, critical accounts of neoliberalism must also move beyond the language of neoliberalism, and find ‘new words . . . [to] deliver us from the pressing evil of being utterly unable to describe the most trivial events of our time without implying precisely the opposite of what we intend to convey’ (Karl Polanyi, 1934, cited in Lacher, 2019: 672). That goal is of course far beyond the scope of this article, which has used Lacan’s theory of the four discourses to unravel some of the drivers of the affective potency of neoliberalism, clearing the space for the future work of thinking beyond the neoliberal horizon.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Henry Maher

References

Berry

(2016) Austerity Politics and UK Economic Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Berry

(2020) From receding to reseeding: Industrial policy, governance strategies and neoliberal resilience in post-crisis Britain. New Political Economy 25(4): 607–625.

Boucher

(2006) Bureaucratic speech acts and the university discourse: Lacan’s theory of modernity. In: Clemens

Grigg

(eds) Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.274–291.

Bracher

(1994) On the psychological and social functions of language Lacan’s theory of the four discourses. In: Bracher

Alcorn

Corthell

, et al. (eds) Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society. New York: New York University Press, pp.107–128.

Brown

(2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.

Butler

(2000) Competing universalities. In: Butler

Laclau

Žižek

(eds) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso Books, pp.136–181.

Cahill

(2014) The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Cahill

Konings

(2017) Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Callison

Manfredi

(eds) (2019) Mutant Neoliberalism : Market Rule and Political Rupture. New York: Fordham University Press.

10.

Clark

Newman

(2012) The alchemy of austerity. Critical Social Policy 32(3): 299–319.

11.

Crouch

(2011) The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

12.

Davies

(2018) The neoliberal state: Power against ‘politics’. In: Cahill

Cooper

Konings

, et al (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp.273–283.

13.

Davies

Gane

(2021) Post-neoliberalism? An introduction. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 3–28.

14.

Dean

(2014) Rethinking neoliberalism. Journal of Sociology 50(2): 150–163.

15.

Dellepiane-Avellaneda

(2015) The political power of economic ideas: The case of ‘expansionary fiscal contractions’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 17(3): 391–418.

16.

Eberle

(2019) Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War. Abingdon: Routledge.

17.

Epstein

(2016) Surveillance, privacy and the making of the modern subject: Habeas what kind of corpus? Body & Society 22(2): 28–57.

18.

Fink

(2017) The master signifier and the four discourses. In: Nobus

(eds) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, pp.29–47.

19.

Flew

(2014) Six theories of neoliberalism. Thesis Eleven 122(1): 49–71.

20.

Foucault

(2008) The Birth of Biopolitics (trans. Burchell

). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

21.

Friedman

(1953) Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

22.

Friedman

(2002) Capitalism and Freedom, 40th Anniversary edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

23.

Friedman

(1980) Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harcourt.

24.

Friedman

Stigler

(1946) Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem. New York: Foundation for Economic Education.

25.

Gamble

(2014) Austerity as statecraft. Parliamentary Affairs 68(1): 42–57.

26.

Gane

(2012) The governmentalities of neoliberalism: Panopticism, post-panopticism and beyond. The Sociological Review 60(4): 611–634.

27.

Gerstle

(2022) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

28.

Gunkel

(2014) Master-signifier. In: Butler

(eds) Zizek Dictionary. London: Routledge, pp. 190–193.

29.

Harvey

(2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

30.

Hook

Vanheule

(2016) Revisiting the master-signifier, or, Mandela and repression. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 2028.

31.

Hunt

(2022a) Statement by the chancellor of the exchequer, 17 October. Available at: https://hmtreasury-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/statement-by-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequer (accessed 1 December 2023).

32.

Hunt

(2022b) Economic update, 17 October. Available at: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2022-10-17/debates/68F2BACA-D0F2-4F1C-8A65-8D29D304B6BA/EconomicUpdate (accessed 1 December 2023).

33.

Hunt

(2022c) Financial statement in the house of commons, 16 November. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/jeremy-hunt-2022-financial-statement-in-the-house-of-commons/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

34.

King

(2022) Liz Truss wears ‘identical’ outfit to Margaret Thatcher at Tory leadership debate. Metro, 16 July. Available at: https://metro.co.uk/2022/07/16/liz-truss-wears-identical-outfit-to-margaret-thatcher-at-tory-debate-17010566/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

35.

Kwarteng

Patel

Raab

, et al. (2012) Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

36.

Lacan

(2006) Écrits (trans. Fink

). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

37.

Lacan

(2007) The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Book XVII (trans. Grigg

). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

38.

Lacher

(2019) Karl Polanyi, the ‘always-embedded market economy’, and the re-writing of the great transformation. Theory & Society 48(5): 671–707.

39.

Laffer

(2022) Comments on fox business, 28 September. Available at: https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6312989237112#sp=show-clips (accessed 1 December 2023).

40.

Maher

(2022a) Foucault against the Foucauldians? On the problem of the neoliberal state. Thesis Eleven 168(1): 72–87.

41.

Maher

(2022b) The relationship between neoliberal ideology and state practice: Corporate power in the Australian mining industry. Australian Journal of Political Science 57(1): 59–74.

42.

Maher

(2023) The free market as fantasy: A Lacanian approach to the problem of neoliberal resilience. International Studies Quarterly 67(3): sqad050.

43.

Makortoff

(2022) City sceptical about benefits of scrapping cap on banker bonuses. The Guardian, 27 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/26/city-sceptical-about-benefits-of-scrapping-cap-on-banker-bonuses (accessed 1 December 2023).

44.

Mandelbaum

(2020) ‘Making our country great again’: The politics of subjectivity in an age of national-populism. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 33(2): 451–476.

45.

Monbiot

(2022) Has Liz Truss handed power over to the extreme neoliberal thinktanks? The Guardian, 23 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/23/liz-truss-power-extreme-neoliberal-thinktanks (accessed 1 December 2023).

46.

Neil

(2013) Breaking the text: An Introduction to Lacanian discourse analysis. Theory & Psychology 23(3): 334–350.

47.

Parker

(2005) Lacanian discourse analysis in psychology: Seven theoretical elements. Theory & Psychology 15(2): 163–182.

48.

Parker

(2014) Lacanian discourse analysis: Seven elements. In: Parker

Pavón Cuéllar

(eds) Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy. New York: Routledge, pp.38–51.

49.

Peterson

(1986) The captain of capitalism. Los Angeles Times, 14 December. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-14-tm-2801-story.html (accessed 1 December 2023).

50.

Read

(1950) Students of Liberty. New York: Foundation for Economic Education.

51.

Rogge

(1979) Can Capitalism Survive? Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

52.

Saad-Filho

(2020) From COVID-19 to the end of neoliberalism. Critical Sociology 46(4–5): 477–485.

53.

Schmidt

Thatcher

(2013) Theorizing ideational continuity: The resilience of neo-liberal ideas in Europe. In: Schmidt

Thatcher

(eds) Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.1–52.

54.

Slobodian

(2018) Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

55.

Slobodian

(2023) Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. New York: Metropolitan Books.

56.

Snow

(2011) Making sense of the controversy. Foundation for Economic Education, 22 February. Available at: https://fee.org/resources/making-sense-of-the-controversy/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

57.

Solomon

(2015) The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

58.

Stanley

(2014) ‘We’re reaping what we sowed’: Everyday crisis narratives and acquiescence to the age of austerity. New Political Economy 19(6): 895–917.

59.

Sunak

(2022a) Comments in Tory leadership debate, 17 July. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rishi-sunak-econonmic-socialism-liz-truss-b2125213.html (accessed 1 December 2023).

60.

Sunak

(2022b) Comments in Tory leadership debate, 9 August. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/08/09/liz-truss-rishi-sunak-tory-leadership-hustings-darlington-latest/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

61.

Sunak

(2022c) Rishi Sunak’s first speech as prime minister. Speech, 25 October. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-minister-rishi-sunaks-statement-25-october-2022 (accessed 1 December 2023)

62.

Tolis

(2023) A method for change. Lacanian discourse analysis: A glimpse into climate policy. International Studies Quarterly 67(3): sqad059.

63.

Truss

(2019a) Fighting labour with freedom: How to embrace generation Z. Speech, 30 January. Available at: https://www.1828.org.uk/2019/01/30/fighting-corbyn-with-freedom-how-to-embrace-generation-z-2/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

64.

Truss

(2019b) Tories can win over the boohoo generation. The Spectator, 12 April. Available at: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/liz-truss-the-tories-can-win-over-the-boohoo-generation/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

65.

Truss

(2021) Comments in ‘Liz Truss: Britain’s new iron lady’. Politico, 30 March. Available at: https://www.politico.eu/article/liz-truss-britain-new-iron-lady-uk-conservatives/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

66.

Truss

(2022a) Tory leadership hustings, 9 August. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/08/09/liz-truss-rishi-sunak-tory-leadership-hustings-darlington-latest/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

67.

Truss

(2022b) Victory acceptance speech. Speech, 5 September. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-victory-acceptance-speech-as-prime-minister/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

68.

Truss

(2022c) First speech as prime minister. Speech, 6 September. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-first-speech-as-prime-minister/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

69.

Truss

(2022d) Email to conservative party members. Email, 7 September. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-first-speech-as-prime-minister/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

70.

Truss

(2022e) Speech on supporting business. Speech, 21 September. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-keynote-speech-on-supporting-businesses/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

71.

Truss

(2022f) Speech to the UN general assembly. Speech, 22 September. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-keynote-speech-to-the-un-general-assembly/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

72.

Truss

(2022g) Interview with Laura Kuenssberg. Transcript, 2 October. Available at: https://www.nationalworld.com/news/politics/what-did-liz-truss-say-laura-kuenssberg-show-kwasi-kwarteng-tax-cuts-key-quotes-3864187 (accessed 1 December 2023).

73.

Truss

(2022h) Speech to conservative party conference. Speech, 5 October. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-speech-to-conservative-party-conference/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

74.

Truss

(2022i) Comments at press conference following dismissal of Kwasi Kwarteng. Speech, 14 October. Available at: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/liz-truss-2022-comments-at-press-conference-following-dismissal-of-kwasi-kwarteng/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

75.

Turner

(2022) Rishi Sunak allies sacked from the Cabinet to make way for Liz Truss loyalists. The Telegraph, 6 September. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/06/rishi-sunak-allies-sacked-cabinet-make-way-liz-truss-loyalists/ (accessed 1 December 2023).

76.

Van Apeldoorn

Overbeek

(2012) Introduction: The life course of the neoliberal project and the global crisis. In: Overbeek

Van Apeldoorn

(eds) Neoliberalism in Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.1–22.

77.

Von Mises

(1969) Bureaucracy. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House.

78.

Von Mises

(1998) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Scholars edition). Auburn, AL: Mises Institute.

79.

Whyte

(2019) The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. London: Verso Books.

80.

Wilson

(2014a) Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid. London: Verso Books.

81.

Wilson

(2014b) Fantasy machine: Philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation. Third World Quarterly 35(7): 1144–1161.

82.

Wong

(2020) The post-neoliberal world is already here. Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 7 May. Available at: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/the-post-neoliberal-world-is-already-here/

83.

YouGov (2022) YouGov survey result, 14–16 October. Available at: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/pij71pi0l7/Internal_Favourability_221016.pdf (accessed 1 December 2023).

84.

Žižek

(1998) Four discourses, four subjects. In: Žižek

(eds) Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.74–116.

85.

Žižek

(2008) The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd edn. London: Verso Books.