In light of the debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, B. Stiegler reveals the biological and evolutionary oversights of neo-liberalism, which was based on the requirement for the human species to adapt to a constantly changing environment.
To listen to most political leaders, business leaders or senior civil servants, in a world that is constantly “evolving”, in full “mutation”, we would always be “behind”: we would have to evolve, create mobility, adapt. What would be the intellectual sources of these injunctions that colonize public life? How did this biological lexicon come to impose itself in political life, to the point of becoming commonplace and erasing the traces of its origins? In order to answer this question, Barbara Stiegler, professor of political philosophy at the University of Bordeaux, offers a very enlightening genealogy of adaptation as a central category of neoliberalism. In the tradition of Michel Foucault, Stiegler thus brings to light the biological and evolutionary references of the renewal of liberalism, the latter having been re-established precisely through the idea of the necessity of the adaptation of the human species to a changing environment.
To do this, Stiegler focuses on the philosophical-political debate that took place in the first half of the XXe century between the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and the influential essayist Walter Lippmann, notably an advisor to President Wilson, best known for the Lippmann Colloquium, held in Paris in 1938, where the concept of “neoliberalism” would be pronounced for the first time. Well identified in the American political literature of the 1990s, the Lippman-Dewey debate serves as a compass for Stiegler to identify the two poles of a theoretical opposition concerning the political meaning of the adaptation of the human species to its new environment. From then on, we see how the central problem of adaptation, already posed by Spencer and Darwin from the 1850s, is developed in two opposing ways, that of a disciplinary neoliberalism, concerned with adapting individuals to a capitalist environment, and that of a democratic pragmatism which privileges experimentation and collective intelligence. Lippmann and Dewey’s reflections on adaptation thus embody two opposing ideal types likely to be carried over to the present day, which gives all its power to Stiegler’s genealogical project. We will attempt here to outline its main points, before questioning it on the genealogy of the “environment” to which it “must” adapt, as well as on the way in which it intends to renew the Foucauldian reading of the problem.
Stasis and flow, Lippmann and Dewey
B. Stiegler continues here, on the terrain of pragmatism and the evolutionary sources of American neoliberalism, a philosophical investigation into the tension between flows (mobility, creativity, spontaneity) and stasis (long-term social institutions, constancy) that she had undertaken in her work on Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Biology, Puf, 2001). What results is a genealogy that is rather philosophical than historical: unlike a scholarly literature that has accustomed us to abundant documentation on this question, B. Stiegler focuses mainly on the texts of Lippmann and Dewey. This economical use of sources could raise some doubts at first glance, but we gain in precision what we seem to lose in abundance, because the opposition between these two thinkers, scrupulously reworked, allows a fully philosophical understanding of neoliberalism.
The historical-theoretical sequence begins with the revival of philosophical evolutionism at the end of the XIXe century, when James, Bergson and Dewey criticize Spencer for still being too dependent on the mechanistic presuppositions of Lamarckism. Dewey supports a possibilist vision of adaptation where the organism enjoys room for maneuver and experimentation, in the face of Lippmann who wishes to renew liberalism by relying on a Spencerian conception of human nature, supposed to adjust to a social and economic environment that imposes itself massively. This understanding of adaptation as an adjustment of the organism to the environment thus leads to dirigiste positions, making the population the target of a policy adaptive to the market, which constitutes precisely the specificity of the neoliberal proposal compared to simple liberal “laissez-faire”. In this respect, the clash between the two approaches is total. Indeed, Lippmann absolutizes capitalism as the definitive environment to which the human species must readapt (p. 201), by assigning to evolution a telos which is only a zealous conformism, while Dewey never ceases to insist on the need to reflect collectively on the conditions and consequences of evolution. Where Lippmann dreams of a readaptation of the human species led by experts and propaganda, Dewey favors communication between citizens which should strengthen social ties and the political community (p. 95). Lippmann relies on a political model where active leaders guide the inert masses, reducing the public to absolute passivity, while Dewey relies on Darwin’s experimental logic for which life is a way of interacting with the environment, and not a passive adjustment (p. 105).
Thus, it is the “Darwinian revolution” (p. 22) and the purpose of the evolution of the human species that are at the heart of the debate, giving full meaning to Stiegler’s project of returning to the evolutionary sources of neoliberalism. For the theorist Graham Wallas (1858-1932) – professor of political science at London School of Economics –, of which Lippmann is a disciple, evolution gradually becomes the watchword of politics since the human species and its environment evolve at an unprecedented speed under the pressure of industrialization and urbanization. It is then for political philosophy to reflect on the means of bridging the gap between the static aspects of social life (institutions, ways of life, habits) and this Big Society characterized by international trade and the circulation of flows. This opposition between stasis and flow shows the foundations of a position that calls itself progressive, even if it defends the most obedient adaptability of the human species to capitalism under the names of globalization and flexibility, discrediting all objections as reactionary and conservative. Thus, the question is “how to resist the neoliberal disqualification of all stases, without giving in to the reaction against the flow and its accelerations” (p. 276). Everyone will appreciate the topicality of this analysis, at a time when the neoliberal transformations of education and health systems are justified by a delay that needs to be caught up and the need to adapt to globalization.
The Shrinking Environment of Capitalism
For Lippmann and Spencer, the environment of the Big Society is therefore identified with the capitalist and globalized mode of production, to which societies must adapt in order to survive. For Dewey, on the contrary, “the social environment is defined by a multiplicity of possible interactions, of which economic exchanges are only one aspect among many others” (p. 200). Thus, the opposition between Dewey and Lippmann is situated in the alternative already theorized by Wallas, where it is a question either of “readapting the human species to its new industrial environment, (or) of readapting this environment itself to the creative potential of individuals” (p. 150). The whole problem of adaptation thus seems to be subordinated to the definition of the environment to which societies are supposed to adapt.
However, the environment as a philosophical problem (whose genealogy is inseparable from that of adaptation) seems deeper than the essentially American configuration to which the work is devoted. Indeed, Spencer takes up the problem as it was posed by Auguste Comte in 1830 from the Lamarckian premises, namely that of the necessary harmony between the social organism and its environment, then elevated to the rank of political project in a context of post-revolutionary pacification. It is then a true politics of environments that emerges in France in the XIXe century, which postulates that society should govern itself by modifying its own environments, up to Durkheim rereading Darwin for his theory of the division of labor as a tool for adaptation to dense social environments. This comparative dimension would complicate the liberal-pragmatist affiliation of adaptation, since the latter is first rooted in the political ambitions of positivism, sociology and socialism, leaving a legacy that Spencer translates into the Anglo-American context by distorting it. However, it is also with regard to this first politics of environments that Dewey’s proposals prove interesting, since he insists on the capacities of individuals to collectively transform their environment and to redefine their own ends together (p. 263), where the French sociological tradition sometimes substantiates the social environments to which individuals must adapt.
On the other hand, such an emphasis on the social and economic environment (in reality industrial and capitalist) is, at least at first glance, quite astonishing in a country like the United States known for the exaltation of wilderness – this supposedly wild natural environment. Reading this work, one could hypothesize the simultaneous advent, in the first decades of the XXe century, of a natural environment conceived as a set of resources to be conserved (as Lippmann puts it), and of a socio-economic environment that must be developed in order to adapt urban populations to it. This dual conception of the environment would undoubtedly deserve to be explored in depth at a time when it is in obvious crisis. B. Stiegler alludes to it in the conclusion of her work (p. 283), when she identifies political ecology as a new field of conflict alongside education and health, these three areas being concerned by a government of populations through the injunction of adaptation.
Finally, one of the merits of this work is to update Foucault’s work on neoliberalism, not by paraphrase, but by investigation. However, if B. Stiegler is right to point out that Foucault is little interested in the biological or evolutionary roots of neoliberalism, his assertion that most of his interpreters have abandoned the question of the transformations of biopolitics could be qualified. Furthermore, Stiegler puts forward a fairly strong hypothesis according to which neoliberalism has become a form of disciplinary power, precisely because Lippmann notes a structural deficiency of the human species (p. 221) that calls for policies of correction, even training. Although it is logically convincing, this hypothesis would undoubtedly benefit from being documented more precisely, especially since it opposes term by term the Foucauldian reading which saw in neoliberalism a softening of the disciplines.
As the conclusion of the book specifies, the historical investigation consisting of grasping the stages of the development of neoliberal thought since Lippmann would be the subject of future work. In the meantime, we will be content with recent works in history that allow us to understand the 1930-1990 sequence, notably through the “economic constitution of the world” by the Geneva school, globalizing the proposals of the German ordoliberals. However, these works seem complementary, Stiegler’s merit residing above all in the effort of philosophical clarification of the opposing positions – one leading to collective intelligence and decision, the other to an unquestioned adaptation to capitalism.
In short, B. Stiegler’s fascinating book profoundly renews the way in which political philosophy can be practiced, by problematizing the central categories of modernity that continue to this day and by updating alternative paths, without falling into vain erudition. It is also through its promises that the book arouses enthusiasm, especially that which consists of developing a ” new philosophical and political conception of the meaning of life and evolution » (p. 284). Quite a program, which we hope to see come to fruition.