The (Ir)rationality of Austerity

Abstract

Austerity is everywhere the order of the day. From the level of regional and national economies to the level of individual choices and expectations, we are told that long-held habits of profligacy must come to an end. The books must be balanced and discipline restored to an out-of-control state and populace. Austerity, as the systematic cutting back on public spending, is the form that this discipline takes. Furthermore, cutbacks in the present increasingly are not thought of in terms of a temporary contraction within a cyclical economy but rather as the route toward a permanent reduction of the state itself—and a corresponding absorption into the private sphere of an increasing number of modes and sites of social life. Austerity is an essential moment in the broader neoliberalization of society within which a rationality of markets, entrepreneurialism, and competition is taken as the only legitimate frame for organizing public policy and public life. Austerity is at once neoliberalism’s political-economic strategy in relation to the public sphere and the moral-ideological schema it proposes to a global society in protracted crisis. Never only a technical intervention, austerity always figures itself also as a necessary and virtuous assault, as a contemporary Nemesis—a leveling karmic force of justice against the outrages and excesses of a decadent society.