The Return of the Leviathan Part 3
It is well known, that the European model of the welfare state has now become unaffordable. Particularly during the 1970s, alongside the USA, western European states experienced a series of fiscal crises as economic growth was tempered and clear limits to the expansion of production became manifest in both ecological and social terms, throughout the world. The welfare state had become too expansive, and – especially in societies where the state’s economic role was already more limited – became interpreted as an obstacle to further economic growth. As welfare became an enemy rather than ally, so was discipline more and more suspect. At the same time as the state became a site of struggle and many bottom-up reform movements emerged in psychiatry, prisons, education and public health, there arose a new alliance between radicalism and capitalism. It found a new common ground in what was already inherent in modernity anyway: individualization (Poulantzas, 1978; Smart, 1983).
Whereas Foucault’s notion of discipline harbours a close relationship with individualization, this was not the kind favoured by the radicalism/capitalism alliance. The problem with the disciplinary form of individualism is that it is entirely formed by social regimes of an institutional or collective nature. That is, the individual produced by discipline is far from sovereign and autonomous, incorporated into complex and expanding systems of communication and control, and as a result ‘moulded’ by the collective consciousness of such systems. Radical capitalism sought to develop a new type of individual, however: one that was not held back by dense and complex figurations and social bonds; one that did not care about collective consciousness.
This careless, undisciplined individual became the heroic subject of a new market and enterprise culture (e.g. monetarism, neo-liberalism) that swept through most of the Anglo-Saxon dominated world. This type of subject is of course far more ideological. Moreover, as it is projected against the institutions of modern civilization, its geneaology had to be traced in a more ‘natural’ precivilized and pre-modern human being. Whereas for the Americans this was to be found in nature itself; for the Brits it was to be found in history. In both cases, in entailed a theory of non-governmentality: all that the state had to do was wither away and the heroic autonomous subject would re-emerge through free-markets and the survival of the fittest. However, with the advent of the undisciplined individual subject there also returned the spectre that haunted Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries (many of whom championed the same autonomous heroic individual subject): a war of all against all. With some many testosterone-laden autonomous individuals competing for the same scarce rewards without care and regard for the social, what could prevent anarchy?
The answer found by the radical capitalist was similar to Hobbes’: a strong autonomous sovereign authoritarian state. The Leviathan needs neither discipline nor ideology as it does not rule by consent, apart from the inaugural consent from every individual to be ruled by the Leviathan (this they did out of pure self-interest anyway as nobody wants to die in a war of all against all). It is obvious that the radical capitalist state, or Leviathan, does not primarily govern through discipline. Although strangely enough, it felt less inclined to dismiss ideology. This can for example be seen in the strong populist agenda’s of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. In contrast to Hobbes’ turbulent days of civil wars and reformations, modern radical capitalist leviathans are elected and to be re-elected they must provide a rhetoric that justifies their (re-)election. Hence, when we observe the British political spectrum of 1980s and 1990s, we notice that there was a clear domination of leviathanism to which the idea of disciplinary society played a mere second fiddle. The risk of social breakdown was still acknowledged, but neither welfare state nor disciplinary institutions were seen as effective guarantees of social order. Instead, the leviathan embraced a reinvigorated moral ideology, paradoxically poised against both liberal individualism (which it otherwise embraced) and social collectivism. It could only do so by separating morality from both the collective and the individual, invoking a notion of timeless, transhistorical morality which the heroic autonomous subject either embraces or refutes. In the first case, the leviathan is pleased; in the second case it sparks his wrath and mobilizes his punishment. This is the essence of what Toni Negri once called ‘the warfare state’.