Authoritarian Liberalisms

The editors are Gianvito Brindisi (Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli) and Antonio Tucci (Università degli Studi di Salerno)

Authoritarian Liberalisms

The notion of authoritarian liberalism was coined by Hermann Heller, arguing against a speech Carl Schmitt gave in 1932 in front of the German ruling class. For many years now this notion has been at the centre of the legal-political debate. With the expression authoritarian liberalism, and with the equivalent notions of neo-liberalism and national-liberalism, Heller stigmatised the idea of a strong State with respect to social claims and democratic pluralism, which renounced the exercise of its authority in the economic field. In condemning an interventionist State in the economy, Schmitt was actually condemning a society that intervened too much in the State.

In the same years, the ordoliberal thinkers (Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow) were adopting this diagnosis to explain the economic crisis and were adopting Schmittian thinking on the need for a strong State with an anti-pluralistic and anti-democratic character capable of depoliticising the economy and homogenising society by depriving it of political energy.

Michel Foucault has shown that, although neo-liberalism certainly legitimises itself on a ‘State phobia’, this does not mean less State at all, but rather a strong State intervening through a utilitarian use of law on society. In a complementary way, the notion of authoritarian liberalism reveals how the neo-liberal’s State phobia is not a phobia against the State as Such, but only towards the State intervention in the economy as the object of social claims and, therefore, a phobia against pluralism and democracy.

Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, the notion of authoritarian liberalism has today taken on such a breadth that it has become a veritable paradigm, capable of rendering intelligible heterogeneous institutional and political realities, from post-Weimar Germany to liberal dictatorships such as that of Chile, from the neo-liberal offensive against democracy in the 1970s to the European political-economic constitution or today’s regressive nationalisms.

However, despite its popularity, leaving out few exceptions the debate missed one of the corollaries of authoritarian liberalism advocated by Schmitt, namely repressive power related to social and political oppositions and the technological control of the masses for the production of social normality. From the point of view of a strategic history of liberalism, this problem is undoubtedly worthy of investigation. In this regard, it isn’t true that – looking at the relationship between technologies of power and the production of subjectivity – neo-liberalism works as an anti-sedition system? Is it not aimed at preventing civil war – i.e., the politicisation of society – while at the same time conducting civil war by other means, according to a strategy that can be traced back far beyond the 20th century?

What is the strategic reality of this notion? What kind of power does it make intelligible today? Against whom is neoliberalism authoritarian? What social struggles does it delegitimise and fight?

Thinking, with Grégoire Chamayou in La société ingouvernable, of authoritarian liberalism as a concept designed to indicate all situations in which, apart from cases of liberal dictatorship, the limitation of political space by economic imperatives is accompanied by the restriction of subaltern means of pressure, this issue intends to investigate, in addition to legal-political theories and institutional architectures, the relationship of authoritarian neo-liberalism with technologies of power and normalisation processes aimed at producing political apathy and favouring the acceptance of the real.

Topics: Genealogy of authoritarian liberalism; Strategic history of liberalism; Economic liberalism and political authoritarianism; Authoritarian neoliberalism and democracy; Authoritarian neoliberalism and pluralism; Authoritarian neoliberalism and processes of normalisation; Authoritarian neoliberalism and technologies of power; Liberalism, neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity; Liberalism and the governability of democracy; Liberalism and the crisis of governmentality; Authoritarian neoliberalism and enterprise; Enterprise and technologies of power; Market and conservatism; Authoritarian constitutionalism; Neo-nationalisms; Regressive Caesarisms; Social science and authoritarianism; Repressive capitalism.

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