“Anyone who believes it is possible to acquire comprehensive knowledge enabling him to control events has no knowledge, but only a pretense of knowledge.” That is the neoliberal worldview in a nutshell, namely, a mere pretense of knowledge. However, the neoliberal lacks the knowledge of the “totality” while needing to know the “rules” to “maintain it.” Not knowing anything about the “totality” while needing to know the “rules” to maintain it is the “essence” of the neoliberal order, as one historian has argued.
Hence, even if the neoliberal order has long denied “structure” and its rules, it wants to know the rules because knowledge of the rules are necessary and are in need of being applied in order to maintain the neoliberal order. But this does not mean that the neoliberal order has been void of its own preconceptions or “propositions” in terms of what constitutes order and structure. In fact, there is a “consensus” amongst neoliberals in terms of order and structure which can be stated or summed up in the following points:
- The order can never be perfect because knowledge is not perfect
- Globalism trumps nationalism and only capitalism is internationalist; socialism is always nationalist
- Order depends on the protection of capital and property against the “overreach” of states
- “Consumer sovereignty trumps national sovereignty”
- International institutions need to prevent “spaces for popular claims-making”
- “Democracy is a potential threat to the functioning of the market order”
- “Democracy’s danger is its legitimation of demands for redistribution” and “all world economic problems are rooted in domestic distribution struggles”
- “Adjudication by judges and scholars is preferable to legislation created by parliaments”
- “Humans follow rules by nature”
- “Predictability” is a “guide to future human action” and as a result, the law must ensure “predictability” by protecting “the role of prices in transmitting knowledge about the future”
- Rules, rules, and more rules are central to creating “the conditions for global feedback mechanisms of human action and the framework for the spontaneous order of the market”
- The role of international institutions is “negative” in the sense that their role is to “prohibit” everything above all else; knowledge is everything, and knowledge is equated to prohibition above all else
- International institutions must be at the center of any global integration if global integration is to occur
- International trade has to be governed by a “legal code” and this legal code “is required for the coalescence of the overall order”
- “Integration is not the creation of something new but the restoration of something lost”
Hence, we see that at the center of the neoliberal order are rules and international institutions, and these rules and international institutions are underpinned primarily by financial networks. It is also worth noting that the neoliberal order is seen by the mainstream as a response or a “solution” to “the end of empire” and the best response and solution to the end of empire is “to promulgate one law for the world economy.” If it were up to the neoliberal order, the American constitution would be abolished by now. The neoliberal is distraught first and foremost by “the problems of constitutional constraints on government.” And the main reason for why the neoliberal is distraught by constitutional constraints on government is because the removal of these constitutional restraints is the key to reconciling democracy and decolonization on one hand and the continuation of the neoliberal order and structure on the other hand.
Adam A. Azim 