The Protestantism of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

This essay illuminates the affinity between of Protestantism and neoliberalism. Drawing on the insights of Max Weber and Michel Foucault, the essay demonstrates how both Protestantism and neoliberalism are premised on a common set of norms and ethical practices. In so doing, I seek to diagram the points of convergence between these two formations to account, in part, for the persistence of neoliberalism. The affinity between Protestantism and neoliberalism is evident in the fact that both entail the rationalisation of a totalising system, reflexive responsibilisation, recasting the pastoral function, the assimilation of labour, the compulsion for action in conditions of unknowability, and the economisation of power.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• protestantism
• Max Weber
• assimilation of labour
• Michel Foucault

Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A late draft of this paper was presented as the Presidential Lecture for the 2023 meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in Victoria, British Columbia. Earlier versions were presented at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University and at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. I thank the audience members in all those forums for their engagement, which assisted me in developing the ideas in this paper. I also received extremely valuable feedback on the essay from members of the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change (Max-Cam), especially Anna-Riikka Kauppinen and Johannes Lenhardt. I also received particularly valuable comments on versions of the paper from Joseph Blankholm, Emile de Rosnay, Ilana Gershon, Doug Holmes, Gary Kuchar, and Bert Westbrook. I also thank the members of my 2021 seminar ‘The Anthropology of Neoliberalism’ for their engagement as I developed the arguments in this paper. I am grateful to the editor of Culture, Theory, and Critique, Greg Hainge, for his engagement with the essay and particularly his skill at finding two exceptionally incisive and rigorous anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly helped me to address some of the shortcomings of earlier drafts. Any flaws of argument, interpretation, or representation are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As a reviewer of this essay noted, the methodological contintuites between Weber and Foucault could be further developed as both sought to use the tools of the Enlightenment to critique modernity and Enlightenment from within.

2 Weber may have overstated the extent to which the individual was made responsible for their own salvation in Protestantism at large. Evangelical Protestant churches, in particular, rely on the rhetoric of salvation as a rationale for membership. Weber’s focus on individual responsibility for salvation should thus be understood as specific to Calvinism and not Protestantism in general. Nevertheless, there is likely relatively greater individual responsibility for salvation in Protestantism, compared to Catholicism. I thank an anonymous reviwer for clarifying this point.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Daromir Rudnyckyj

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Past President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and the Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. His research has addressed globalisation, capitalism, religion, finance, development, Islam, and money. He is currently researching the socio-technics of money, focusing on complementary and alternative currency experiments. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (Chicago, 2019). His first book Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell, 2010), was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. He is also the co-editor, with Filippo Osella, of Religion and the Morality of the Market (Cambridge, 2017).