I think this is a great question. I will immodestly say that I’m trying to think about this question myself in some writing I’m working on now, but I expect that to take a while.

I don’t think the great critiques of neoliberalism out there like David Harvey’s book are really talking about this kind of institutionalization of neoliberalism and they’re not much help in understanding it.

One of the challenges here is that asserting that these patterns–and the problems they produce–are systematic and philosophical means that the answer cannot be simply a different set of procedures or processes. Indeed, what I’m thinking of as “neoliberalism” in this institutional sense has proven remarkably adept at stripping the larger goals or aspirations of some criticism and adapting that critique to its own systemic nature. When neoliberal institutions encounter critiques of diversity (racial, gender, etc.), they turn those critiques into new procedural logics (do workshops on bias! create incremental metrics that document greater attention to diversity!). When they encounter evidence that conventional styles of meetings are unproductive and simply reproduce existing forms of managerialism, they look for a new style of meeting (thus avoiding the more complicated problem of managerialism).

So I think to talk about the failings of a neoliberal habitus involves the breathtakingly difficult challenge of asking what a more humane style of working together towards common purpose might look like and what might be expected to come of that. If were to say, for example, that academic institutions should wholly abandon all forms of managerial assessment (of teaching efficacy, of scholarly productivity or impact factor, etc.), what would I argue is better (and in so doing make clearer what was wrong with assessment regimes under neoliberalism?) It is easy to find books that explain what’s wrong with neoliberal assessment (Jerry Mueller’s The Tyranny of Metrics or Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction) but those critiques explain that those metrics don’t do what they’re claiming to do and they do other unintended things that hobble or cripple an organization in achieving its stated mission. They don’t reject on principle the idea of assessing effectiveness. So one could say that maybe if you leave people to think for themselves, in terms that make sense, whether their work is going well, and to think in dialogue about shared work, you will largely get a better and more humane outcome than if you manage them. Faculty autonomy proposes exactly this: that people who subscribe to a professional ethic can be left alone to live up to that ethic and only require management in the breach. “Strong” neoliberalism flips out about this point because it has a philosophical conception of human beings which it rarely has to defend explicitly and never has to verify through skeptical examination in which it believes human beings will cheat, fail, and shirk responsibility if they are not monitored and managed.

And yet even the proposition about autonomy and professionalism often accepts that every properly professional person ought to be striving for a kind of maximalism: to do the best, to do the most, to achieve peak performance. So I can imagine a more human managerialism that simply sees a belief about autonomy as a different road to the usual objectives: for organizations to extract maximum value from the people they have hired. That’s where on one hand Ilana Gershon’s writing about changes in how we value labor is useful but also where a book like Daniel Milo’s Good Enough might be helpful. Maybe a more humane way of thinking about work and life involves abandoning altogether an ethos of maximalism (before climate change perhaps compels us in a panic to do so under conditions that do not permit reflection). Perhaps that same idea (that we don’t need to be the best or the most, just adequate) could open working together and living alone to other kinds of reflection that neoliberalism does not allow: what do we value, really? Why?

Do you have any books (or essays, articles, etc) you’d recommend to better understand how *neoliberal* decision-making differs from other forms, and perhaps examples of modern institutions that embody non-neoliberal ways of approaching problems?

I ask because, when I read articles (like this one) that describe neoliberalism in terms of near-term-ism and an obsession with incremental gains, disproportionate skepticism of non-quantitative data, and so on, it feels like something very real and grotesque is being described—

—but I always fail to articulate the specific *failings* of neoliberalism in more general discussions, since, well, arguably we can encode any given thing we want to achieve in terms of these incremental gains and missions (just as one could describe virtue ethics *in terms* of denotology, merely by choosing those deontological rules very carefully), and how *do* you expect to measure or analyze the effect of a policy on a large population without missions and incrementalism?

I’d like to better be able to understand and articulate the anti-neoliberal position, basically..

(Your blog post seems like a good start and I’ll be thinking about consider-risk-first vs consider-values-first for a while, but I’m assuming there’s other literature out there?)

Thanks for any recommendations you can offer.