Abstract
From 2010 to 2013, legislators in Rhode Island enacted a series of neoliberal reforms to increase “business friendliness” in the state. Where economistic, electoral, organizational, and diffusion accounts fail to explain the timing and content of these reforms, I synthesize the work of Georges Sorel and Jeffrey C. Alexander to argue they were motivated by the myth of the business friendly economy. More than mere narration, this myth set before lawmakers the vision and the promise that a business friendly economy would return prosperity to the state. It prompted neoliberal legislation by integrating “business unfriendliness” into collective understandings of Rhode Island’s economic failure, defining policy reform as a moral imperative, and projecting a vision of the ends towards which reform should be oriented. This analysis contributes to cultural, economic, and political sociology by reclaiming myth as an alternative framework to assess the symbolic dimensions of political transitions, providing explanation for an otherwise puzzling case of neoliberalization, and suggesting opportunities for future research to problematize political actors’ deployment of economics in their attempts to project possible futures and shape action in the present.
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Notes
This last provision was repealed in 1985 (Moakley and Cornwell 2001, p. 152). The requirement for weekly pay schedules was repealed in 2013 as part of the General Assembly’s economic development reforms.
Here I use Stephanie Lee Mudge‘s (2008) definition of neoliberalism as a political logic regarding the responsibilities of government, the means of government, and the interests government should serve. This logic promotes education and training over welfare protections, efficiency, decentralization and free-market orthodoxy over regulation and protectionism, and financial, professional and white-collar constituencies over the working class and trade unions.
See de Leon (2014) for a more extensive review.
When Sorel retired from the French civil service in 1892 and moved to Paris to write full-time, Marxism was little known. By 1895 only the first volume of Capital, The Communist Manifesto, The Class Struggle in France, and The Civil War in France had been translated into French. Sorel’s were thus “amongst the first serious writings on Marxism in France” (Jennings 1985, p. 38). His initial interest grew from his admiration of Marxism as a scientific method to explain the value of labor and capitalist development, a position he elaborated at length in ‘L’ancienne et la nouvelle métaphysique’ (ibid, pp. 41–42). He became an editor of the Marxist journal L’Ere nouvelle [The New Era] and eventually founded another Marxist journal, Le Devenir social [The Social Future] (Portis 1980, pp. 9–10). By 1894 he was the leading Marxist theorist in France (Jennings 1985, pp. 37–38).
This structuralist definition of myth is often considered at odds with Marxist approaches, which critique the former for overlooking the politics inherent in cultural systems (Bourdieu 1991, 1995; Diamond 1979; Godelier 1971; Lincoln 1999, pp. 145–146). However, there have been efforts to synthesize the two approaches (Lincoln 1999). As I argue below, the structuralist definition helps us theorize why myths might help orient and motivate political action.
Note that while myths are often interpreted as a form of narrative, not all narratives are myths. That is, myths necessarily involve narratives, often of shared struggle, founding moments, or promised futures, but not all narratives contain the classificatory and moralizing characteristics of myth.
See also Alexander and Smith (1993).
It is here that I depart from Sorel in two significant ways. Sorel discusses myth exclusively as a critique of parliamentary socialism, which he believed allowed for a circulation of elites at the cost of proletariat liberation. My focus, however, is the circulation of myths as a practice of everyday politics. Relatedly, Sorel discusses myth only in regards to mass publics, and he sees mythical thought as lying outside the realm of modern, technocratic government. I argue, however, that the line between the technocratic and the mythical, between state practitioner and public, is not so distinct, and that we should understand legislators and policymakers as being just as susceptible to the mobilizing power of myth as the mass publics Sorel describes.
Mudge distinguishes between the intellectual, bureaucratic, and political “faces” of neoliberalism. Where the intellectual face refers to the professional dissemination of neoclassical economics, and the bureaucratic face refers to state policies that promote free market competition, the political face refers to a distinct political ideology that values “individualized, market-based competition over other modes of organization” (2008, pp. 706–707).
An exception would be Mitchell’s (2014) discussion of the economy as a means for “bringing the future into government.” However, where Mitchel focuses on the techniques and materiality of economics, I focus on the social performances in which economic representations are embedded.
Involvement in the economic development reform process meant the respondent sponsored a reform bill, was a member of a committee that evaluated a reform bill, assisted in the drafting of a reform bill, or testified for or against a reform bill. Respondents selected for their Democratic Party leadership positions were current or former members of the Democratic legislative leadership in the Rhode Island General Assembly.
EDC was Rhode Island's quasi-public agency reponsible for firm recruitment and expansion at the time.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Special thanks also goes to Cedric de Leon, Apollonya Porcelli, Josh Pacewicz, Nitsan Chorev, Jennifer Bouek, Meg Caven, Lukas Rieppel, and Bhrigupati Singh, who read and commented on previous drafts. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Social Science History Association. This research was conducted with the generous support of an NSF-IGERT grant disbursed by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All errors and omissions are, of course, my own.
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Lotesta, J. The myth of the business friendly economy: making neoliberal reforms in the worst state for business. Am J Cult Sociol 7, 214–245 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0058-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0058-x