Conclusion

The conclusion considers widespread dispositions to resentment and pity that can appear motivate resistance to neoliberalism and shows why they instead shore up unjustified hierarchies. Instead, it is argued that the disposition to solidarity can become prevalent by looking at the crucial role that social movements play in making it possible to call for solidarity and to respond to such calls. Participating in social movements can be an attractive expression of freedom for both workers and consumers governed by supply chains and, by repoliticizing neoliberalism, can create additional political possibilities that cannot yet be anticipated. These social movements are a crucial form of political power undertheorized by egalitarian liberals and neoliberals alike. It is argued that social movement organizing should be understood as a widely available, reversible form of governmentality compatible with freedom.

Why Sovereignty Is Not the Solution

Many critics of neoliberalism argue that resistance requires reasserting unconstrained state sovereignty, but this response effectively reinforces the neoliberal distinction between politics and the market rather than attending to the authority, coercion, and contestation that pervade the global economy. Such appeals to unconstrained sovereignty are found across the political spectrum; left egalitarian arguments for Brexit are illustrative. The chapter highlights contemporary philosophers like Thomas Nagel, who argue that distributive justice is only possible thanks to state coercion and that distributive justice is necessary to legitimate state coercion. Ultimately, by appealing to unconstrained state sovereignty as necessary for politics, this approach—and others which similarly draw on Weber—homogenizes state power and consequently overlooks the different ways people experience its force, such as racial disparities in the use of force by police. Such a theory is ill-suited for understanding what equal political status actually requires, even domestically.

The Significance of Solidarity

This chapter argues that bringing about egalitarian justice under neoliberal circumstances requires being disposed to solidarity with others who are also subject to unjust institutions. When unjust institutions cross state borders, people should regard others who are subject to those institutions as potential partners in efforts to resist them. Seeing these others as partners means that people should be alert to appeals to act from those they rely on, open to hearing out claims that they have misperceived their political status, and ready to understand the robustness of their freedom as partly dependent upon theirs. Such solidarity is mutually beneficial because people have a common interest in the removal of some shared obstacle to freedom. The advantages of the view are shown through comparison with rival accounts by Iris Marion Young, Sally Scholz, Avery Kolers, and others.

Ugly Progress and Unhopeful Hope

In order to provide an account of orientation to unjust circumstances, the book’s account of freedom must confront a tension within it: What is the value of this ideal to people who have grown up under unjust institutions and who consequently have not developed freely but instead have been profoundly habituated by unjustified inequality and oppressive hierarchy? The chapter shows how thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Theodor Adorno transform the dispositional conception of freedom to navigate unjust circumstances. People alive today will never be able to enjoy the kind of free development possible for those who grow up in a just society, but it is still possible to use such an ideal critically to orient people today to both constraints on freedom and opportunities to express what freedom they do have.

The Outer Limit of Freedom

This chapter draws on G. W. F. Hegel and John Rawls to develop a novel account of freedom that shows how many people can see themselves as having an interest in resisting unjust institutions. Taking seriously the effects that social and political institutions have on people before they could ever choose them means that freedom has an essentially retrospective element; a key experience of freedom is the recognition that the institutions which have shaped individuals are ones that could have been freely chosen. Rawls calls this “the outer limit of freedom” and says it is expressed in the dispositions that are acquired from just institutions. In a well-ordered society, citizens both meet their political obligations and express their freedom when they are disposed to reciprocity with each other. Highlighting these Hegelian dimensions of Rawls’s thought shows how egalitarian liberals can be part of a broader egalitarian coalition.

Seeing (Like) Supply Chain Managers

This chapter examines transnational supply chains to make visible their actual operation and show how it diverges from the neoliberal way of dividing up and legitimating the political and economic realms. In practice, supply chains diverge significantly from the neoliberal vision of spontaneous, self-organizing market activity and more closely resemble the kind of economic planning neoliberals decry. When pressed to explain these prevalent economic forms, even neoliberals concede that economic activity is not only dependent on extraeconomic coercion from the political realm, but itself shot through with claims to authority, which is demonstrated through an interpretation of Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm. Workers and consumers who are subject to supply chains can contest these claims to authority—in the first place, by insisting on their right to freedom of association with each other—and thus begin to repoliticize the economic realm that neoliberals seek to encase.

Neoliberal Theory as a Source of Orientation

This chapter substantiates the author’s interpretation of the neoliberal theory of political legitimacy through a reconstruction of the views of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, whose works were key to popularizing neoliberalism and its attendant orientation. The task for those who want to resist neoliberalism is to provide people in such circumstances with another way of attending to their situation. Neoliberal theory divides the world up into the economic realm of freedom and the political realm of coercion, but in order to get people to see the world this way, it relies on the techniques of power that Michel Foucault dubbed “governmentality,” which escape this neat dichotomy. Neoliberalism’s tacit acknowledgment of its reliance on these forms of power, which preserve freedom of choice but nevertheless reliably guide people to particular perceptions and actions, lays the groundwork for an emancipatory reorientation that recognizes the political nature inherent to the economic realm.

Introduction

The need for an orientation to the global economy is introduced by considering how an apparel consumer in the developed world should respond to the deaths of apparel workers in the Tazreen factory fire and Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. These paradigmatic global injustices are not well understood by standard egalitarian approaches to global justice. Those approaches focus on the comparative wealth of the developed world, but in doing so, they overlook the ways that the global economy is also experienced as unfair by workers there. The chapter argues instead for recognizing that many people in both Bangladesh and the United States have an interest in changing the institutions that govern the global economy. The chapter explains what a conception of orientation can do and why a range of theoretical traditions can endorse the book’s account in light of neoliberalism’s ascendance. The book’s remaining chapters are also summarized.