Why Neoliberalism Doesn't Spell the Death of Society: Commonality, Regulation, and the Politics of Social Cohesion

Perspectives on neoliberal political-economic practice often frame its dominance in terms of harms to 'society'. Prominently, Wendy Brown (2019, 52) offers an account of the 'neoliberal revolution', claiming that, when 'the social vanishes from our ideas, speech, and experience', commonality disappears, democracy diminishes, and authoritarianism prevails. The paper considers this understanding to argue for the importance of political articulations of 'society', which reveal complexities that elude nostalgic accounts of how the social has been lost. Making this case, it works through real-world invocations of social commonality in the name of social cohesion. Social cohesion illustrates the multiplicity of objectives invoking 'society', ranging from the production of pro-social subjects to the pursuit of resilience against shifting scenarios of social collapse. On this basis the paper problematises perspectives that either treat the social as an artefact of administrative practice or that prioritize experiences of moral purpose and commonality. It argues that such positions risk mythologizing 'society' if they don't attend to the complex circumstances of its political articulation.