Book in the spotlight: Adapt! On a New Political Imperative by Barbara Stiegler
Barbara Stiegler is the ultimate people’s philosopher. A professor at Bordeaux-Montaigne University, she came out in support of the yellow vest movement in France, donning a yellow vest herself; inveighed against a number of pandemic measures put in place by the French government during the Covid crisis; expressed her support for the hard-left leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon; and hit out against yachts as a symptom of neoliberal predation. She is the Marianne in Delacroix’s famous painting, shaking her fist at the elites and oligarchs on behalf of disenfranchised and voiceless masses to a rousing “La Marseillaise” in the background. An untamed critic of neoliberalism, Stiegler wants to usher in a neo-Athenian government by the people and for the people, restoring the power that had supposedly been taken away from them by the forces of globalization. I must admit that I tend to be leery of philosophers who rhapsodize about “the people” – what starts as a love affair with the demos usually ends with a descent into ochlocracy or totalitarianism. But Stiegler is different. She has spent a lot of time studying what makes neoliberalism tick, and her book Adapt! On a New Political Imperative is an extraordinary study of the roots of neoliberalism. Although translated into English and appearing, with uncanny timing, during the Covid pandemic, it has generated little interest in the Anglosphere, an indifference that can only be explained by some deeply seated belief that the French have nothing to tell us. Yet the work is a penetrating diagnosis of a political doctrine that, according to Stiegler, is responsible for the prevailing economic paradigm, complete with widespread immiseration, yawning inequalities between elites and commoners, the political castration of the public, and the rise of the expert class – a paradigm that affects a truck driver from Wichita, Kansas, as much as it does a French intellectual in Bordeaux. It would be a stronger work still if it weren’t an example of what happens to diagnoses when the doctors making them happen to be politically engaged.
Stiegler views the development of neoliberal doctrine through a biopolitical lens. Popularized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, the term “biopolitics” has strangely not infiltrated mainstream discourse, even though biopolitics has permeated the modern world for some two hundred years. As the Industrial Revolution transformed pre-industrial society, a new way of administration had to be adopted to deal with a rapidly rising urban population and the emergence of the industrial economy. Simply put, a different kind of governance was needed for a society that told the time by looking at the clock instead of the position of the sun, and one where people clustered in densely populated urban areas. Foucault identified biopolitics as that new type of administration spawned by the Industrial Revolution: a politics that sought to manage the health of the citizenry and the environment in which these citizens lived. Stiegler describes Foucault’s biopolitics as “a form of public action directed at the human species, the health of populations, and the quality of their natural and urban environments” (here and elsewhere, all translations are mine). Foucault hitched biopolitics to liberalism. What he missed, in Stiegler’s analysis, is the influence of Darwinism and evolutionary theory on those thinkers and intellectuals who gathered in Paris in 1938 to formulate a new kind of liberalism. Classical, laissez-faire liberalism had by then been discredited following a series of economic crises and, against the backdrop of an illiberal groundswell in Europe and beyond, liberalism had to be refashioned. Whereas the liberalism of Adam Smith and other classical liberals held that the rational nature of man required no intervention on the part of the government, the new liberals saw man as deficient and therefore in need of a dirigiste approach. Their liberalism was not providential but evolutionary; it was biopolitical. Stiegler argues that this new liberalism – neoliberalism – became the blueprint for the future of Western societies, and it is to those who attended the Parisian colloquium that we are indebted for the pathologies of modernity. She singles one man specifically as their architect and mastermind.
Walter Lippmann: The man, the myth, the legend
Although his name has all but been dissolved in the juices of modernity, to use a turn of phrase he greatly favored himself, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was once hugely prominent. A brilliant thinker, a prolific writer, and the villain in Stiegler’s story, Lippmann was born into a well-off Jewish family in New York. After graduating from Harvard University, where he had come to know George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, Lippmann went on to write for The New Republic, quickly making a name for himself. By the time the last gun stopped firing in Europe in 1918, Lippmann had done important work for Woodrow Wilson, having contributed, among other things, to the US president’s Fourteen Points. Although he returned to writing after his involvement with the Wilson administration, his influence continued to grow. At one point, Lippmann’s column “Today and Tomorrow” was syndicated by more than two hundred newspapers, reaching an audience of some 30 million readers that included a number of US presidents. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Lippmann had full access to the White House and to foreign leaders too; he interviewed Mussolini in Italy and Khrushchev in Soviet Russia. John F. Kennedy quoted Lippmann in a book; De Gaulle offered him feedback on his writing. He was one of the few journalists to ever address the UN. Such was his stature that President Lyndon B. Johnson, annoyed by a critical piece Lippmann had written, is said to have remarked that God was not dead; he appeared twice a week in The Washington Post.
But beneath this unimpeachably mainstream facade, dark waters flowed. Analyzing Lippmann’s oeuvre, Stiegler meticulously charts his intellectual development and eventual transformation into the godfather of a starkly anti-democratic ideology. Lippmann came of age at a time when thinkers were preoccupied with resolving the tension between “absolute flux” (Darwin’s inheritance) and “stasis,” a generic term Stiegler introduces to describe the efforts of living beings to stabilize the state of flux. The doctrine of laissez-faire – espoused by Herbert Spencer, who had applied Darwinism to human affairs – was on the verge of bankruptcy. The market was no longer viewed as a providential mechanism that could dispense with government intervention; Adam Smith’s invisible hand had lost its magic touch. The big question bedeviling orphaned intellectuals was how to integrate man into the Great Society, the title of a 1914 book by Graham Wallas (with a dedication to his former student Walter Lippmann). The Great Society was the modern society created by the Industrial Revolution; what made it great was the unprecedented disruption in the relationship between man and his environment – the rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution had transformed the environment, while man had remained essentially unchanged. To regulate this disruption, a new political paradigm was needed, and it is the search for the right paradigm that was at the heart of Lippmann’s thought. He believed that man was incapable of keeping up with the new environment and, therefore, could not be counted upon to make good decisions about how to organize life. It followed that democracy was not suitable for the Great Society. Although Lippmann initially started out as a progressive in favor of “central direction of the economy, regulation of trusts, and a well thought out procedure for implementing social justice for the masses” (from Walter Lippmann: Philosopher-Journalist, a biography by Edward and Frederick Schapsmeier), his early works already showed signs of an incipient political demophobia. In a 1913 text (A Preface to Politics), for example, Lippmann suggested that modern leaders had to surround themselves with experts, a view that prefigured his later championship of the expert class.
By 1922, the year when Lippmann published his seminal Public Opinion, this sentiment had hardened. In Public Opinion, Lippmann argues that people’s ideas about their reality are highly distorted and what people take to be their reality is only a “pseudo-environment.” Their warped perceptions about their pseudo-environment are their opinions; when a given opinion takes hold of a multitude of people, it becomes Public Opinion. Hampered by their biases, prejudices, and stereotypes (fun fact: Lippmann coined the term “stereotype” in the modern sense of the word), people are incapable of making decisions that are beyond their immediate reality. For democracy to work, “conditions must approximate those of the isolated rural township.” Since this is obviously impossible in a modern country, one must conclude that people are incapable of participating in democratic deliberations. Rejecting the myth of the “omnicompetent citizen,” Lippmann suggests that society should be governed not by the masses but by leaders who will rely on a “specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.” This specialized class will help the leaders organize public opinions for the press (instead of having the press do it) and manufacture consent for society to steer it in the right direction (another fun fact: although the concept of manufacturing consent is associated with Noam Chomsky, it was Lippmann who introduced it). People should not be burdened with expert opinions; those should be delegated to the “responsible administrator.”
Lippmann doubled down on this in The Phantom Public (1925). As the title suggests, Lippmann contests the existence of a public as such. It is a “mere phantom . . . an abstraction . . . merely those persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.” The public as it is conceived in popular discourse should not be deciding anything; its only task is to adjudicate on whether the actors in any controversy are following the established rules or their own self-interest. For Lippmann, Stiegler writes, political action should aim at “imposing a consensus that brings all rhythms to the same pace”; political conflicts should be resolved not through public debate but procedurally. Stiegler sees this as a “depoliticization of the political field itself.” If the public is an active participant in a democratic model, in Lippmann’s thought it is reduced to a passive spectator; it is effectively disempowered, domesticated, and removed from the equation.
It is in The Good Society, a book that appeared in 1937, that Lippmann drew up a roadmap for neoliberalism. Identifying the Industrial Revolution as the mother of all revolutions that completely upended the traditional way of life, Lippmann credits it with “what sociologists call a ‘cultural lag’: that is to say, men have brought to the solution of present issues ideas and habits appropriate to a situation that no longer exists.” He dismisses both fascism and communism as symptoms of man’s atavism and little more than false dawns. He upholds the primacy of the market: “The liberal philosophy is based on the conviction that, except in emergencies and for military purposes, the division of labor cannot be regulated successfully by coercive authority . . . the true line of progress is not to impair or to abolish the market, but to maintain and improve it . . . The market is the only possible method by which labor that has been analyzed into separate specialties can be synthesized into useful work.” But his paeons to the market are qualified. He takes issue with what he calls the “latter-day liberals,” particularly of the Spencerian mold, whose fetishization of the market precludes any intervention. An unfettered market takes a considerable toll on human society that, if left unmitigated, increases the appeal of political false dawns. Just as motorists require traffic rules if circulation is to be safe and efficient, the market needs to be overseen and occasionally interfered with if it is to function well within the Great Society. But it is not the business of the government to do it, as socialists maintain; common law is the only instrument that can and should regulate the market. Lippmann criticizes the latter-day liberals for sacralizing law, and treating it as if passed down from on high and therefore inviolable. He contends that, on the contrary, law can be adjusted, modified, and adapted in response to changing conditions (losing sight, it seems, of the fact that those tasked to do it might be victims of their own pseudo-environments).
But, as Stiegler points out, halfway through the text Lippmann contradicts his previous analyses. Acknowledging that even a well-regulated market alone is insufficient, Lippmann militates for a politics that will, Stiegler writes, “aim to transform an ill-adapted human species into a group of individuals that are flexible and increasingly well adapted to the acceleration of change.” Lippmann insists that, absent a miracle machine that will produce a limitless supply of goods to satisfy the needs of people, the market economy engendered by the Industrial Revolution is mankind’s only viable option. Whether we like it is nothing more than an aesthetic preference. A given mode of production is not inherently good or bad; it just is. A mode of production is unfair only to the degree that the institutions in service of the mode of production are maladjusted to it. The perfecting of a liberal society, The Good Society tells us, requires a “political system that will refine, rather than respond abjectly to, manufactured mass opinion.” The mission of liberalism is to “develop the principles by which mankind could readapt its habits and institutions to the industrial revolution.” Liberalism must readapt “the human race to a new mode of existence.”
This was a radical restatement of liberalism, but one must also consider the context. The memory of the Great Depression was fresh; Germany was ruled by Hitler and the Soviet Union by Stalin; the world was edging towards a world war. Between the Scylla of laissez-faire liberalism and the Charybdis of totalitarian paroxysms, Lippmann’s new liberalism appeared to many as a viable third way. A French intellectual taken with the work organized a colloquium in Paris in August 1938. Named in honor of its star guest, the Walter Lippmann Colloquium brought together thinkers and intellectuals of diverse liberal inclinations who, after some gestation, delivered a brand-new version of liberalism that we now know as neoliberalism: a government that seeks to safeguard the market through continuous intervention in the affairs of its citizens in order to make them more suitable to the market’s exigencies. This, Stiegler concludes, is Walter Lippmann’s legacy, a gift that keeps on giving. But any story with a villain must also have a hero.
John Dewey: The good guy
Though Stiegler uses him as a foil for Lippmann, the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) was also influenced by evolutionary thought. He certainly agreed with Lippmann about the significance of the Industrial Revolution, the cultural lag of man, and the need to integrate man into the Great Society (in The Public and Its Problems, to which Stiegler refers extensively, Dewey acknowledged the intellectual debt he felt he owed to Lippmann). He was thoroughly steeped in biopolitics. But he diverged from Lippmann on a number of fundamental issues, giving rise to the so-called “Dewey-Lippmann Debate,” a late-20th-century concept that postulated a debate that had never actually taken place.
While both men recognized the imperative of the new environment, they had a markedly different conception of man’s relationship with this environment. Lippmann sided with classical liberals and natural liberals by affirming the “ready-made” state of man – man is not malleable, his nature is static, and he is perpetually condemned to lag behind his constantly changing environment. People are inert and passive, forever at the mercy of the environment in which they operate. In this view, the relationship between man and his environment is unilateral. Dewey, however, interprets Darwinism differently. “Instead of organisms bending passively to the demands of their environment,” writes Stiegler, “every readaptation requires an active and continuous interaction between organisms and their environment.” Living organisms interact with their environment in complex and unpredictable ways; man’s relationship with his environment is dynamic and reflexive. Far from being a passive victim of his environment, man can actively shape it. If man lags behind the environment, it is because he is a victim of the very ideology that never gives him a chance to catch up. Dewey rejected what Stiegler calls Lippmann’s teleology (the belief that the future has a predetermined goal, namely, the global division of labor – a belief that, Stiegler notes, is at odds with Lippmann’s staunch opposition to any kind of central planning in human affairs). Nothing in human destiny is fixed; the future is open-ended and amenable to manipulation by man.
This reinterpretation of evolutionary thought informed Dewey’s political thought. If man can shape his environment, nothing should prevent him from full participation in all democratic deliberations. While Lippmann held liberalism to be a historical necessity, Dewey believed in the inevitability of not liberalism but democracy. As he says in The Public and Its Problems: “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.” (Compare with Lippmann’s The Good Society: “Liberalism, unlike collectivism, is not a reaction against the industrial revolution. It is the philosophy of that industrial revolution.”) Dewey thought that the liberal emancipation of man in the 19th century was illusory – while man had been freed from older stases, the concentration of wealth and transformation of individuals into standardized and interchangeable units had created new ones. Liberalism had atomized man and deprived him of his individuality. It is not man who is lagging behind the environment, as Lippmann claimed; the existing forms of power are. Forms of power can, and ought to, be changed. Dewey, Stiegler maintains, propounded socialism – but with a twist. He wanted the means of production to be seized – not through confiscation of property but by confiscating the cultural capital held by the elites. Since people are malleable, government by the masses is perfectly possible, provided the masses possess the cultural capital needed to give them an adequate education.
Dewey derided Lippmann’s idea of an expert class as little more than the resurrection of the Platonic idea of philosopher-kings, objecting that there is no reason to suppose that intellectuals can govern the masses if the latter truly are ungovernable, and that such an expert class will invariably be out of touch with the needs of society. The problem with the public is not that it is passive, or stupid, or utterly incapable of government, but that it is not sufficiently developed. Dewey argued that communitarianism is instrumental in the formation of a public sufficiently enlightened to make democracy work. Once such a public is created, it will be able to make policy. The public will not be “consulted,” presented with a choice, or asked to ratify decisions that have already been made for it; the public will set the agenda. Stiegler refers to this as “radical liberalism,” thus adroitly marrying liberalism off to socialism and democracy.
On politically engaged philosophers
The 2023 French edition of Adapt! contains a post-Covid afterword, which Stiegler begins by describing her conflicted feelings at the time the book came out in 2019. France was reeling from the yellow vest protests, and Stiegler struggled to maintain a scholarly detachment during interviews about her book while, as she coyly confesses, keeping quiet about her own participation in the protests. How, indeed, to keep at bay one’s pronounced ideological bias when writing a work of political thought and philosophy? Stiegler never seems to have resolved this successfully, and the massive blind spots in her book are an edifying testament to this failure.
The most obvious problem is Stiegler’s conflation of biopolitics and (neo)liberalism. To be sure, she admits that the multiplicity of biopolitical forms complicates her thesis of neoliberal hegemony, but this complication is never fully treated. The reality is that biopolitics is not an epiphenomenon of neoliberalism, as Stiegler suggests, but one of the Industrial Revolution. Nazi Germany implemented policies of eugenics and used concentration camps to regulate human life. The former Soviet Union treated humans as disposable material during its program of rapid industrialization, promoted the cult of the worker, and adopted a universal vaccination policy that never recognized freedom of conscience. China, another state not known for its neoliberalism, had a one-child policy for years. However shrill the exhortations to adapt in neoliberal countries, they are no less shrill in non-liberal societies that do not want to be left behind in the dust. Stiegler elides the fact that, along with secularism, biopolitics goes hand in hand with industrialization.
Equally problematic is Stiegler’s use of Dewey as an antidote to Lippmann. As mentioned previously, Dewey countered Lippmann’s jaundiced view of human nature with the belief that man was not “ready-made” and could shape his environment. In the hoary debate between nature and nurture, Lippmann sided with nature and Dewey with nurture. By siding with Dewey, Stiegler falls into a trap of her own making. Aside from her exaggeration of the “ready-made doctrine” (no one in their right mind will argue that man is “ready-made” in the sense that he is churned out from a conveyor belt; it is more a question of the immutability of man’s nature), if you conceive of man as immutable, your policies will aim at shaping the environment to ensure it can accommodate man and prevent him from wreaking havoc. If you conceive of human nature as malleable, however, you will endeavor to shape man. It is this second model that lands squarely in the biopolitical framework, and it opens the door to all sorts of nasty experiments. Did the Bolsheviks not aspire to create a New Man? Did the Nazis not have schools to develop racially pure Odin-worshiping warriors to slash and burn their way to Valhalla? The use of education as the cornerstone of Dewey’s “radical liberalism” that Stiegler finds so attractive might just as easily end with labor camps designed to reeducate the ideologically recalcitrant as with proper schools that seek to turn their charges into virtuous citizens. And while Stiegler might well object by pointing out that Dewey never envisioned a top-down, centralized approach, that, as she puts it, it is only “the publics themselves, and no other body in their place, that should take charge of social experimentation,” she offers no clear guidance on how this is to be achieved in a large country with a heterogeneous population. In the absence of a clear action plan, any proposed delegation of social experimentation to the public remains more than a little dewy.
Finally, there is Stiegler’s exaggeration of Lippmann’s influence and her tendentious presentation of his thought. Hedging herself, Stiegler acknowledges in her conclusion the danger of trying to impute too much significance to a minor historical figure. After 300+ pages of seeing his name on virtually every one of them, this is hardly persuasive. It certainly contradicts an argument advanced earlier in the text: “With the new liberalism theorized by Lippmann, there opens a new age of biopolitics” (the italics are Stiegler’s). But this is to overemphasize the role of a single intellectual in the affairs of a country, particularly one as complex as the US. Dewey himself warns in The Public and Its Problems against ascribing major societal changes to the “doctrines of doctrinaires.” Coming from a country where intellectuals have traditionally been given a place in mainstream discourse, Stiegler perhaps forgets that America is not primarily an ideological country, and that it tends to be rather skeptical of intellectuals. US presidents may have courted Lippmann assiduously, but their relationship with him was troubled. Lippmann often expressed criticism of their policies – precisely because, in the end, they did what they thought was best and not what Lippmann said was best in “Today and Tomorrow.” The idea of Lippmann as some kind of Svengali stretches credulity.
But Stiegler not only exaggerates Lippmann’s importance; she also caricatures his ideas, which were complex and evolved over the decades. In The Public Philosophy (1955), Lippmann calls himself a “liberal democrat,” before adding that he hopes “both liberty and democracy can be preserved before the one destroys the other.” While Stiegler almost appears to equate liberty with democracy, Lippmann knew better. It is a truism to say that a decision or policy can be perfectly democratic and at the same time liberticidal. A popular decision to imprison everyone whose first name is Barbara will, if backed by two thirds of the population, be democratic while not at all liberal. Liberalism and democracy are in a dialectical relationship that can only be resolved within a juridical framework and by the supremacy of law. This was Lippmann’s main argument. He vehemently disagreed with the idea that a decision made by a majority should be absolutized and that a victory determined by fifty-one percent of the nation was somehow “the voice of the people.” To claim otherwise, Lippmann opined in his column, was to end up in a situation in which Hitler was “planning to have the Nazis rule Germany for a thousand years as a result of an election held in the winter of 1933.” Lippmann insisted that the sacralization of power taken away from monarchs ought not be conferred upon the masses, and that neither Plato nor Jesus had ever proposed to determine virtue by a show of hands. Lippmann did not think that a politicized society in which citizens are overly interested in politics is a sign of a healthy society. He scoffed at the idea that the problem of democracy can be resolved by more democracy – in other words, by asking a bewildered citizen dazed by the complexity of issues at hand to vote on them more often.
Lippmann’s so-called elitism (“so-called” because his defense of an expert class is no more elitist than the insistence that only surgeons should perform surgery) belied his concern with the plight of the disadvantaged. In The Good Society, he shows a keen awareness that large chasms between the haves and have-nots corrode society and must be prevented. He advocates the use of heavy taxation on the rich and anti-monopolistic regulation to prevent wealth imbalances and concentrations of wealth that decouple wealth from hard work – measures that, one would think, align quite nicely with aspects of Mélenchon’s platform. In her treatment of Lippmann’s texts, Stiegler often acts like Procrustes, performing amputations to fit them into her thesis. There is an unfortunate tendency to cherry-pick and take things out of their context. For example, discussing Public Opinion, Stiegler writes that Lippmann’s new expert class is to be composed of “sociologists and psychologists.” Actually, he never mentions psychologists in that context. He does mention “statisticians, accountants, experts of all sorts” as the “true pioneers of a new social science.” Elsewhere, accountants, auditors, engineers, and even secretaries make the list, but of psychologists there is not a word.
Another quote, this time from The Good Society, looks positively dystopian when decoupled from the rest of the text: “The economy requires not only that the quality of the human stock, the equipment of men for life, shall be maintained at some minimum of efficiency, but that the quality should be progressively improved.” But what follows is a lot less nefarious. Lippmann insists that private property rights must reflect the needs of all generations – past, present, and future. He writes that while capital should be mobile, labor should not – people need to be attached to their land to retain their wholeness. To prevent rootlessness and friction that comes with large migration, Lippmann says that education should aim “to make most men versatile and adaptable in the place where they were born, and of economic policy to make capital mobile.” Stiegler views the “most men” qualification as an elitist reflex to keep the masses tethered to their land while letting the elites bounce around the world. But there is nothing in the text that suggests Lippmann actually means that; by definition, there will always be some migratory flux. Here, as elsewhere in Adapt!, one wonders where Lippmann ends and Stiegler begins.
Stiegler often presents Lippmann’s observations as prescriptive or normative, whereas they are only meant to be descriptive. She downplays his pragmatism and clear-eyed realism. Lippmann writes in The Good Society: “In the end no nation can fail to enter this system where common law prevails: if it is backward, unable or unwilling to make its portion of the earth secure for the new economy of the division of labor, its certain destiny is to be conquered. Unless it is as remote as Tibet, in one way or another it will be brought within the necessary jurisdiction of the Great Society.” Stiegler cannot accept this teleology, but in the end, Lippmann has been proven right. The civilized world has been brought within the jurisdiction of the Great Society – not because Lippmann and a few other intellectuals conspired to do it, but because there are civilizational processes that are beyond our control. Tolstoy may have gone too far with his trivialization of the role individuals play in the drama of history, but history may well have its own logic and laws that must be obeyed. Industrialization was inexorable. A country cannot remain agrarian as the rest of the world industrializes. Just as an individual who insists on using a buggy in the age of the automobile will get pushed off the road, a nation that refuses to enter modernity will be condemned to oblivion or a takeover – economic or military – by an industrialized country. This state of affairs can be lamented, but it cannot be denied.
While Lippmann called himself a liberal democrat, he was more of a liberal conservative. In his later years at least, he praised the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Above all he admired Burke – a complex and frankly overrated political theorist, but not exactly Machiavelli or Genghis Khan. He was highly allergic to all forms of totalitarianism and saw the ability to subvert democracy through democratic means as a major flaw of democracy. He deplored the declining standards of education; the atrophy of Judeo-Christian tradition; and the puerility, lack of restraint, and “spiritual proletariat” – as he called people with no convictions – of modern society. While he did not think that society could return to religious orthodoxy, he was conscious of the need for something to fill the spiritual vacuum created by the secularism of the Great Society. He thought that humanism and reason could take the place of the old theism – as his biographers say, “a rational religion for those who could no longer accept the older and outmoded dogmas.” Vague and boneless, yes – but then one cannot reinvent the wheel.
From Saint-Simon to Klaus Schwab
As mentioned earlier, Dewey regarded Lippmann’s advocacy of an expert class as a return to Plato’s idea of philosopher-kings. But we need not go that far; a quick trip to 19th-century France will do. Although Stiegler never mentions his name, it is not too much of a stretch to call Comte Henri de Saint-Simon Lippmann’s ideological progenitor. It is to Saint-Simon that we can trace the idea of technocratic elites who, endowed with a superior understanding of the technological needs of their time, lord it over the masses; it was Saint-Simon who preached the incompatibility of elite rule with democracy; it was Saint-Simon who wanted an expert class to “gradually condition [mankind] to take their proper part in the industrial order” (from Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal). Saint-Simon may have been one of the first modern thinkers to identify the Great Society and the need to adapt man to its rigors, and his organic and critical periods sound a lot like Stiegler’s states of flux and stasis. These ideas continue to live on. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum and the darling of conspiracy theorists, might not quite frame it that way, but his stakeholder capitalism, if the alacrity with which large corporations have embraced it is any guide, smacks of technocracy. (Additionally, as an alternative to the shareholder capitalism of the West and the state capitalism of non-liberal countries, it parallels Lippmann’s neoliberalism, which was meant to be a third way between laissez-faire liberalism and centrally planned economies.) Stiegler never references Schwab either, but her mention of Mont Pèlerin, the founding site of a classical liberal society, is sufficient – Mont Pèlerin is about 235 kilometers from Davos, as the crow flies.
The emergence of political leaders who prod their subjects to march forward, along with the rise of an expert class unaccountable to the populace, is a Saint-Simonian echo. In her afterword, Stiegler singles out President Macron as an exemplar of Lippmannian neoliberalism: a leader who, aided by unelected experts, governs the country with no regard for the demos. It is hard to disagree: the original name of Macron’s party (En Marche! – “on the move”) is a clarion call for constant adaptation, and Macron’s own professed desire to be a “Jupiterian” leader is of a piece, for the gods are never accountable to mere mortals. Stiegler identifies the Covid pandemic – the ultimate biopolitical experience – as a pivotal moment for neoliberalism. Aside from the litany of Macron’s imperious, and frequently absurd, emergency decrees (the reader might recall that the two words most used during the pandemic were “experts say”), Stiegler writes that the response to the pandemic prompted neoliberalism to mutate and reinvent itself. The all-encompassing virtualization of life ushered in a new paradigm, denuding all human interactions of their “social and political significance” (Adapt!) while turning every individual into an entrepreneur whose relations with others were reduced to market interactions and a QR code.
Her analysis of the Covid pandemic is highly convincing (though I must point out that, the experience of the pandemic having been in many ways a case of the cure being worse than the disease, plebiscites are not typically held during crises). So is her analysis of the mutation of neoliberalism. But her conclusion – the need for a neo-Athenian democracy – is not. Such a model might work in a country like Switzerland, with its unique geography and demographic landscape; it is unclear how it can be implemented elsewhere. Nor is one convinced by the straight line she draws between Lippmann and the Covid-era “new normal.” Suggesting that the ultimate trajectory of Lippmann’s neoliberalism is a technofeudal dystopia is like saying that the ultimate trajectory of democracy is Hitler. Lippmann made mistakes, he was wrong about much, but he saw the world for what it was and never got carried away. Whatever the temptation to connect him to Macron or anybody else a politically engaged philosopher might have in mind, Lippmann’s religious inclinations, however unspent or repudiated, preclude the reduction of Lippmann to a cheerleader for Stiegler’s model of neoliberalism. I have in mind the last chapter of The Good Society, which contains a surprising homage to religion and the religious. Lippmann praises religion as the greatest bulwark against tyranny and despotism. Religion is “the source of the inspiration, that makes men secure in their manhood, rejects the pretensions of their masters, invests the human personality with infinite dignity and untold promise.” It is the rejection of the soul that invites tyranny. The obvious corollary of Lippmann’s conclusion is that religion is freedom – the sort of freedom to balance and mitigate the Great Society and biopolitics. I doubt this kind of talk interests Macron, Schwab, or most of the folks who gather yearly in Davos. It certainly does not interest Stiegler, and the result is a certain lack of substance in an otherwise fascinating book. Lippmann possessed that substance. He understood that man needs myth; that man does not live by bread alone; and that it is the search for the transcendental, and not some political utopia, that has animated humanity since the dawn of history.