The Assault on the public

Furthermore, the power of the state was directed against the labour movement and other social movements if they resisted the attack. Hayek himself and Milton Friedman, for instance, had little issue with the exercise of the coercive powers of the state if they were used against labour, even by quasi fascist states such as Pinochet’s Chile.

The intellectual story is no less interesting.  In the neoliberal scheme of things, society is an emergent property of rational utility maximisers engaged in market based voluntary exchange. This is “rational” for only such a society can efficiently produce, distribute and allocate resources.

The neoliberals that came after Adam Smith fully realised that markets hardly promote equality, but also, unlike Smith, they were elitists with little to no concern for equality.

The staples of neoclassical economic theory have been expanded beyond the economic domain under the rubric of a highly mathematical “rational choice theory.” There can be no such thing as a public with collective interests and concerns of its own.  Here rational actors, existing in a world characterised by competition, act strategically in order to achieve a given set of preferences. There are no collective interests and public cooperation arises either through force or through recognition that collective action promotes individual interests.

There exists hardly any room for the common good, morality, altruism and social norms unless they somehow promote individual interests; such concepts largely serve as fig leaves to hide the self-interested motives that lie beneath them.

The intellectual edifice used to support the attack on the public has no grounding.  To be sure the theorems of rational choice theory are correct in so far as the proofs of the theory are soundly made following a logical chain of reasoning founded on a set of axioms or assumptions. But that does not mean that the axioms themselves are sound or that the proofs have empirical validity, much less implications for government policy.

It is the second point that is crucial for the attack on the public is based on the assumption that rational choice theory does indeed possess such empirical validity, so thereby any rational society would frame policy with reference to it.

We might identify three problems with all this. Firstly, studies of economic behaviour demonstrate that we are not as rational nor utility maximising as neoclassical economic theory assumes. Secondly, it tallies against the cognitive revolution. Thirdly, the global economic crisis has amply demonstrated that neoclassical economic theory, from which rational choice theory emerges, falsely concludes that markets are rational.

The first and third are by now familiar, however the second is less so. There are many social species in the living world that develop social structures and social norms; we are no exception. These social structures must somehow be based on some cognitive system of information processing that occurs within the mind/brain, itself arising from a natural or genetic endowment specifically focused on the social domain rather than a generalised faculty of reason. So it is with Homo sapiens.  The empirical study of this particular social faculty is what social theory ought to be.

Rational choice theory is a particular perversion of liberal political theory. A key idea of traditional liberalism is the notion of a social contract. The various permutations of social contract theory are not as important as is the obvious recognition that in liberal approaches people band together in social structures in order to promote collective interestsand some idea of the collective good in ways not made possible through the set of individual action.

It is an especial irony that rational choice theory developed out of the RAND Corporation, which was tasked with developing theories of nuclear deterrence to support nuclear war fighting strategies that the public in democratic societies opposed.

That points out to us another form of public subsidy our erstwhile rationalists and liberals do not question namely the public subsidy of quasi scientific ideas in secular societies that buttress the attack on the public. That is why economics is placed on a pedestal, and rational choice theory is de rigueur in American political science departments.  Should the attack continue such subsidisation shall doubtless also continue.

In the global debate on university funding public subsidy of attacks on the public are rarely discussed.

The attack on the public is made possible by a full frontal assault on democracy, the coercive use of state power, and politically motivated intellectual sophistry none of which are remotely liberal.