Political projects with universalising ambitions implicitly or explicitly seek to create certain kinds of person. They recognise particular qualities of mind, particular forms of flourishing, particular personalities, and they seek to make from these the ideal types of their society. Politics is ethics at scale. In postwar social democracy the Fordist consumer-producer enjoyed rising material prosperity under the benign gaze of the philosopher-administrator. Postwar Man - this Keynesian subject was male and white - was a responsible employee, he enjoyed his summer holiday abroad, a new car every few years, and the comforts of family life. Moderation was celebrated and rewarded. The costs were paid by others; by women, by minorities and by the peoples of the global south.
In Thatcherite neoliberalism all of us were prodded by policy into becoming calculators of our own best interests. Before the judgment of the market we were all equal and we were all equally alone. The common good emerged from the work of countless individuals as we identified what we wanted and pursued it in a society that had become a marketplace. Thatcher’s relationship with Thatcherism is ambiguous. It is by no means clear that she understood how her economics would transform the British. But transform us she did. The reliable breadwinner gave way to the successful speculator as the epitome of virtue.
The human and material costs of this attempt to impose freedom on us are becoming increasingly apparent. In response centrist politicians hanker to recreate the conditions that made their careers possible and the collapse of neoliberalism’s legitimacy inevitable. The right are as ever more clear-eyed, and now make their accommodation with those forms of populism that offer, in exchange for continuing agonies of dislocation, the unifying consolations of spite. After all, almost everyone can look down on someone.
