Acceso usuarios
Jessica Schmidt
The article takes issue with available critiques of resilience as self-evidently in keeping with neoliberal governance. It complicates this contention by making three interventions. First, it highlights how key neoliberal thinkers invoked evolutionary rationalisations to challenge liberal forms. Second, in drawing on the work of Friedrich Hayek and Douglass North, it proposes that neoliberalism, rather than a success story, seems to be confronted with a central paradox as it shifts from apologia to governmentality. This paradox concerns the incommensurability between portraying the world as complex and non-linear in which cause-and-effect relations cannot be securely established, on the one hand, and understanding human agency primarily in terms of goal-oriented decision-making, on the other. Third, it suggests that it is early pragmatist theorisations, rather than neoliberal thought, that can help us comprehend resilience rationalities. While pragmatists shared the evolutionary-complex ontology with neoliberal thinkers, it is particularly its Deweyan version that offers a different conception of human agency and its relation to the world. Dewey’s pragmatism redirects agency into the inner life of humans as the site where genuine change and transformation can be effected under conditions of complexity. The overall argument made is that resilience thus emerges as a mode of governance that should be understood as a response to the dilemma of neoliberal logics rather than a continuation of its system of rule.
