RT Article
T1 Hayekian Neoliberalism as Negative Political Theology
JF Political theology
VO 21
IS 7
SP 623
OP 633
A1 Kirkland, Scott
LA English
PB Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group
YR 2020
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/173593593X
AB In this paper, I will investigate the relationship between aspects of Whiteheadian process thought and political theology in Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek. While scholars have noted the differences between later actual existing neoliberalism and Lippmann’s text, important continuities remain. One of these continuities is the way political boundaries police, and yet serve, economic relations. It will be argued that the unknowability of complex economic relations, thought with the help of Whitehead, gives way to a way of theoretically fencing politics and economy from one another. For Hayek, this boundary marking exercise serves to police the space of individual liberty, for it is the collectivist impulse to interfere with the unknowable and sublime object, the market, which leads to the chaos of German political life in the wartime period in which he writes. Hayek and Lippmann collapse the mystery of sovereignty into economy, and consequently legitimatise a legal architecture serving only to guard this mystery.
K1 A. N. Whitehead
K1 F. A. Hayek
K1 Neoliberalism
K1 Sovereignty
K1 Walter Lippmann
K1 Economy
K1 Negative Theology
DO 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1800197