[lbo-talk] negative freedoms

Eric rayrena at realtime.net
Fri May 16 13:36:34 PDT 2008


From David Harvey's very bad book on neoliberlism:

"At the popular level, the drive towards market freedoms and the commodification of everything can all too easily run amok and produce social incoherence. The destruction of forms of social solidarity and even, as Thatcher suggested, of the very idea of society itself, leaves a gaping hole in the social order. It then becomes particularly difficult to combat anomie and control the resultant anti-social behaviors such as criminality, pornography, or the virtual enslavement of others. The reduction of 'freedom' to 'freedom of enterprise' unleashes all those 'negative freedoms' that Polanyi saw as inextricably tied in with the positive freedoms."

Never mind that in the US crime drastically decreased during what's commonly seen as the neoliberal era.... This is the point where Harvey's teary-eyed nostalgia for Keynesian arrangements crosses over into a conservative yearning for social control ("coherence"). And it's a surprisingly short walk.



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