Property and capital in the person: Lockean and neoliberal self‐ownership
1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM?
In his canonical study David Harvey introduces neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well‐being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2). However, he also adds (with a quote from Paul Treanor) that the neoliberal belief in the market constitutes “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs,” and that neoliberalism has “pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common‐sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (p. 3).
The question of neoliberalism, then, is just as much about ethics, forms of life, everyday hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology as it is about political economy. Despite this initial emphasis on the centrality of the entrepreneurial ethos and its totalizing tendencies, however, Harvey's study offers little insight into how those pervasive effects come about and how they stabilize and promote the neoliberal project. Rather, it conceptualizes neoliberalism as just another ideological tool of the capitalist ruling class which, after being hit by the stagflation crisis in the 1970s, started an orchestrated program of “accumulation through dispossession” to “restore the power of economic elites” (p. 19). Despite his perceptive insight into some of neoliberalism's novelty, Harvey ultimately reduces it to its role in the capital‐driven class struggle of a society that is understood in orthodox Marxist categories (see Dardot & Laval, 2013; Lemke, 2010; Read, 2009).
But if the neoliberal effects on ethics and common sense are in fact so pervasive and all‐encompassing, it is those very categories that are at stake. It is here that Foucauldian approaches, preoccupied with the coevolution of modern states and subjectivity, can play out their advantages. Their main conceptual tool to shed light on the nexus of the state and the subject is Foucault's notion of governmentality, an “ugly word” (Foucault, 2007, p. 115) that he introduced in 1978 to overcome some of the theoretical problems of traditional Marxism.11 Foucault's struggle with Marx's categories is a productive one, but it also comes at a price: he sabotages his own project by omitting the analytic category of capital from his lectures in 1977–1979. This results in a serious limitation of his analysis of neoliberalism (see Brown, 2015, pp. 75–78).
Government, for Foucault, denotes all kinds of strategies that “structure the field of possible action” (Foucault, 1982, p. 221), and the governmentality approach consists in “examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them, because it is true that ‘practices’ do not exist without a certain regime of rationality” (Foucault, 1991, p. 79).
[A]t stake in neo‐liberalism is nothing more, nor less, than the form of existence—the way in which we are led to conduct ourselves, to relate to others and to ourselves… . Neo‐liberalism can be defined as the set of discourses, practices and apparatuses that determine a new mode of government of human beings in accordance with the universal principle of competition. (pp. 3–4)
Traces of this universal principle of competition can be found far beyond the economic sphere and the workfare policies of contemporary social and educational systems—it has become an influential cultural narrative, too, ranging from happiness guidebooks to, say, the quantified self movement (for the latter, see Whitson, 2013). The neoliberal rationality thus promotes and enforces a bundle of regulative ideas on how to exist, behave, and flourish as a human being. As a vast body of literature has shown, the subjectivity thereby created is distinctly entrepreneurial; for it is the entrepreneur who figures as the hero of the neoliberal narrative of universal competition.22 Most comprehensively in Bröckling, 2016; but see also Pongratz & Voss, 2003; Peters, 2001; Bührmann, 2005; McKinley & Taylor, 2014; and Mulcahy, 2017.
Ulrich Bröckling's (2016) genealogy of neoliberal subjectivity, for example, traces the emergence of the entrepreneurial self from the 1980s onwards as a “real fiction” similar to the doctrine of homo oeconomicus that became hegemonic less than a century earlier (and which remains the backbone of the new paradigm). In contrast to the “classical” economic man of Bentham or Smith, as Wendy Brown (2015) reminds us, the neoliberal subject “is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value” (p. 10).
This amalgamation of subjectivity and entrepreneurship takes one fraction of potential human actions and motivations—those that are directed towards competitive market environments—and declares them to be universal (see Bröckling, 2016, p. 11). One implication of this amalgamation that has not received nearly enough attention is the implicit subscription of neoliberalism to the doctrine of self‐ownership: neoliberal subjects own themselves, even if this implication is rarely made explicit in neoliberal theory—or, so I will argue, in what is to come. If neoliberal rationality analyzes the subject as the vanishing point of the acquisition, reinvestment and reassessment of some kinds of resources, assets, or capital, then someone must own this “human” capital.
In order to delineate the concept of self‐ownership, I will discuss its origins in early modern Britain in some length (Section 2). This discussion will help preparing the main argument (Section 3), where I aim to show that self‐ownership is an indispensable part of neoliberal rationality (even if it remains implicit in most neoliberal theory) and use that for an immanent critique of neoliberalism. The conclusion summarizes the argument and discusses a few implications (Section 4).
2 THE ORIGIN OF SELF‐OWNERSHIP
To shed some light on the notion of self‐ownership, let us explore the context of its first emergence: the socio‐political conflicts of 17th century Britain. By that time the centralization of both legislation and the tax system had progressively superseded the feudal order, resulting in the growing dependence of the ruling classes on economic forms of exploitation (as opposed to feudal serfdom). This intensified the ongoing enclosure of common land and the suppression of traditional conceptions of property and use rights. The result was not just a rising concentration of landed property in the hands of the gentry, but also the creation of huge numbers of dispossessed people—a straightforward case of “accumulation through dispossession” (Harvey). Due to the spread of large‐scale tenant farms that replaced the previous forms of subsistence agriculture and installed competitive market mechanisms for both rent and products, the result was the gradual emergence of a new economic regime: agrarian capitalism (Kennedy, 2008; Meiksins Wood, 2002, 2012).
2.1 The levellers’ intervention
Richard Overton's famous 1646 pamphlet, An Arrow Against All Tyrants (reprinted in Sharp 1998, here: p. 55), for example, opens as follows:
To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self‐propriety, else he could not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be.… God by nature has made him free.
The Levellers thus conflate property and liberty to present as strong a case as possible for their emancipatory and democratic claims. The royalists and oligarchic republicans argued that political liberties are conditional on material wealth and land ownership; the Levellers accepted this conflation of liberty and property, but replaced landed property (which a privileged few owned) with property in the person (which everyone owns). This enabled them to use the well‐established language of property against their political rivals: every man is an owner, so if ownership grants political and economic rights, then every man has those rights. In consequence, property discourse could no longer be used to trump political rights discourse.44 During the Putney Debates, for example, Major William Rainsborough argued that while “the chief end of this government is to preserve persons as well as estates . . . my person it is more dear than my estate.”
Their intervention was therefore really just a way to claim self‐governance and democratic rights; and self‐ownership denotes from its very beginning a social relation, rather than a relation to oneself.55 Note also that the Levellers argued that material property is grounded in self‐ownership: “Mine and thine cannot be, except this be.” Self‐ownership is the basis not only of political but also of economic liberty. As Sabbadini (2013, pp. 79–87) has shown, similar arguments can be found throughout the Levellers’ pamphlets of that time. The Levellers’ relation to private property might have been an uneasy and non‐uniform one, but they were not in principle opposed to it. C. B. Macpherson's (2011) claim that they were unambiguous proponents of possessive individualism is too strong, but so is the (republican) prejudice against the Levellers that their aim was to abolish property.
2.2 Lockean self‐ownership
Three decades later (and in changed political circumstances), John Locke took up the issue of self‐ownership and develops it into a comprehensive doctrine. In the Second Treatise (Locke 1988, henceforth “ST”), written to strengthen the Whigs’ ideological position during the Exclusion Crisis (see Laslett, 1988), he famously states that “every man has a property in his own person. This no Body has any Right to but himself” (ST, §6). This dictum has been the starting point of virtually every discussion of self‐ownership ever since, and it is often said to provide the normative foundation upon which Locke's political philosophy is built. This is more than an over‐simple reading: quite simply, it is wrong. Locke's conception of self‐ownership is not as axiomatic or freestanding as it might seem. It borrows both its normativity and its specific content from elsewhere.
Normatively, Locke's self‐ownership is grounded in God's ownership of the human species, as his workmanship argument is intended to show: being God's creation, human beings “are his Property … made to last during his, not one anothers pleasure” (§6). If they were to “harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (ST, §27) they would deprive God of this pleasure and thus violate natural law. This argument achieves two things at once: First, it naturalizes private property by inscribing it into the very nature of the created world, treating God as the ultimate owner. Second, it endows every individual with a sphere of non‐interference against each other, a sphere that Locke calls property in the person. Importantly, this property is not attributed to a pre‐existing human being with moral rights other than its self‐ownership, but it constitutes that very being (see Waldron, 2002, pp. 44–82).
As such, however, his sphere of non‐interference is a purely negative result and its implications are far from clear. What exactly does it mean, positively speaking, to be a self‐owner? After all, a mere sphere of non‐interference is perfectly compatible with the idea that nobody owns anyone whatsoever (perhaps because, as Kant famously argued, selves are not the kinds of entities that can be owned at all). What we see here is that, as Alan Ryan (1994, p. 254) instructively puts it, the notion of self‐ownership is “parasitic on whatever conception of proprietorship the speaker has in mind.”66 This is a genuine insight. Compare G. A. Cohen (1995), who is only able to fill “self‐ownership” with content ex negativo: to own oneself simply implies to have all the moral rights a chattel slave lacks. Given that the libertarians he wants to criticize typically claim that self‐ownership must be presupposed in order to understand what is wrong about slavery, the notion becomes strikingly circular. See Cohen (1995), p. 68.
What, then, is the specific content of Lockean self‐ownership? What, in other words, is Locke's conception of proprietorship?
I think there are two aspects to the answer to this question. First, the theological commitments Locke needs to get the notion off the ground to begin with establishing more than just a sphere of negative liberty. If the whole world is always already owned (by God), its use requires entitlement. God grants this entitlement by giving the world to humankind in common and commanding them to populate and subdue it (ST, §§26, 34). As we are to “last during His, not one another's pleasure”, this is more than merely an entitlement to make productive use of our sphere of independence: It's a duty to do so. Property in the person is thus more than just a sphere of negative liberty. It imposes certain obligations (or, with Foucault; a certain rationality) on the subject it creates: As God gave the world to humans “for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it,” there is a duty to be “industrious” (§34) and to “subdue the earth,” that is, to “improve it for the benefit of Life” (§32).
- Landed property was Locke's primary example of property throughout the ST, e.g., when discussing the proviso, the invention of money, and the labor theory of value. As Neal Wood (1984, p. 51) notes, “[o]f the twenty‐seven sections of the chapter, twenty‐two referred to agricultural property and its problems.”
- Land is part of the normative foundation of the acquisition of property, as Locke stressed repeatedly: “God, by commanding to subdue, gave authority so far to appropriate” (ST, §35).
- Locke himself called it the most important form of property. In his day, he tells us, “the chief matter of property” was no longer “the fruits of the earth and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself, as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest” (ST, §32). In a later edition of the ST, Locke adds a passage which makes the improvement of land the very aim of politics (pace Rainsborough, see note 5): “the increase of lands, and the right employing of them, is the great art of government” (ST, §42).
- Locke was a deeply agrarian thinker. He was profoundly preoccupied with agricultural improvement and enclosure throughout both his personal and his professional life. Growing up in a rural area, he inherited a modest piece of property at his father's death and dealt with farming activities after joining the household of the future Earl of Shaftesbury; he wrote extensively on agriculture, on agricultural economics, and in defense of colonialism and agrarian enclosure; he was in contact with many agrarian reformists and owned a multitude of handbooks and treatises on farming and agriculture (see Wood, 1984, pp. 15–30). In Meiksins Wood's (2012, p. 257) summary, Locke was “keenly interested in agriculture; and this interest … is reflected in his theory of property.”
Traces of this model and its agricultural connotations can be found in Locke's account of property in the person, too, most notably in its metaphorical language. Locke repeatedly used phrases like “invading other's rights” (ST, §§7, 46, 137, 176 etc.), alluded to fences when talking about individuals’ freedom (§17) or security from absolutist despotism (§93), and construed positive laws “as Guards and Fences to the properties of all the Members of the Society” (§222). So when Locke thought of liberty as a sphere of non‐interference, he was influenced by the model of an enclosed piece of land.
And why wouldn't he? The model of landed property is attractive for Locke's purpose, mainly because of its intuitive association with liberty and the sense of identity it provides. Owning agrarian property—especially in Locke's times—makes people independent of one another and provides existential security, as it allows for self‐sustenance and long‐term investments into future revenues. Land ownership is also tied to a sense of identity as it is relatively easy to fence off, that is, to establish a boundary between what is one's own and the outside world.77 It is no coincidence that Isiah Berlin (2002) uses a spatial metaphor to introduce his conception of negative liberty in (what he believes to be) agreement with Locke.
Similarly, if I own myself I the same way that I own a piece of land, I can fence off and cultivate what is valuable to me, such as my religious, civic, and economic virtues, without depending on others. It is this sphere that civil society aims to secure, for without a liberal state, it would remain “constantly exposed to the Invasion of others” (ST, §123).88 Étienne Balibar (2002, p. 302) has argued that “the essential ‘subject’ of liberty in Locke” is “property in the abstract.” To that, I would want to add the qualification that Locke's notion of property is not all that abstract, but rather, saturated with theological and agrarian connotations.
To conclude our brief historical discussion, the notion of self‐ownership was originally a rhetorical means used by the Levellers to present as strong a case as possible against the association of material wealth and political rights. It accepted the oligarchic conflation of liberty and property but metaphorically internalized the relevant property into the subject, thereby transforming the oligarchic argument into an egalitarian one. Locke took up these issues and developed them into a coherent doctrine. This doctrine, however, isn't easily reconcilable with the Levellers’ aims: “Locke's brilliance is found in his ability to employ Leveller discourses in ways that maintain rather than overturn the established hierarchies of power and the existing distribution of landed property” (Kennedy, 2008, p. 224; see also Meiksins Wood, 2012, pp. 256–287).99 This settles, I believe, the old discussion as to whether Locke is a radical egalitarian (Ashcraft, 1986; Tully, 1980) or, at the other end of things, a bourgeois apologist of a market society (Macpherson, 2011).
Besides launching a powerful attack on absolutism (and thereby channeling the more radical democratic forces during the Exclusion Crisis), Locke's arguments served the interests of the landed classes well. They justified enclosure and colonial trade; they opened up the possibility of disenfranchising individuals through the notion of tacit consent; and they analyzed social problems such as unemployment—a notorious by‐effect of enclosure—as a mere failure of individual morality that called for harsh disciplinary means (ranging, in Locke's case, from forced labor and workhouses to cutting off ears; see Kennedy, 2008, p. 223–224).
Locke's political position in the Two Treatises is thus closer to that of Cromwell and Ireton, the Levellers’ oligarchic republican opponents in the Putney Debates. He witnessed the gradual rise of a new property regime (that we later came to call agrarian capitalism)—a regime that deracinated and dispossessed unprecedented numbers of people by dissolving their commons‐based and self‐sustaining forms of life, but that also set into motion tremendous productive forces. In this dynamic situation, Locke used the political fiction of self‐ownership (as Carole Pateman calls it) to maintain that the only property that truly matters for individual liberty—property in the person—remained untouched. What was lost during enclosure is metaphorically compensated for by the discovery of property in the person. The credo, “Everyone an owner!” took the sting out of the ongoing dispossessions and subjected everyone to an ethos (or rationality) of labor.
3 NEOLIBERAL SELF‐OWNERSHIP
To my knowledge, no prominent author from the neoliberal spectrum explicitly advocates the doctrine of self‐ownership. And yet I want to argue that self‐ownership remains a backbone of neoliberalism. My argument to that end proceeds in two steps. Earlier on, I introduced neoliberalism less as a theory of political economic practices (Harvey) than as a regime of rationality (Foucault). Now I will argue, first, that all versions of neoliberal theory construe freedom essentially as economic freedom, with a strong emphasis on property rights: neoliberal freedom is a function of property. But being free qua ownership is not necessarily the same as being free qua self‐ownership (although it is compatible with it). My second step will be to argue that in neoliberal rationality we can find distinct traces of self‐ownership: the entrepreneurial self is necessarily self‐owning.
3.1 Neoliberal theory: Freedom as property
On the face of it, liberty or freedom seems like the ultimate normative foundation of neoliberal theory. However, neoliberals unequivocally spell out freedom as a function of economic freedom, i.e., “[f]reedom of contract, the inviolability of property, and the duty to compensate another for damage due to his fault” (Hayek, 2013, p. 206).
For neoliberals, strong (private) property rights are thus a necessary condition of freedom. This is a first point of convergence of all major variants of neoliberalism. Whether we consult ordoliberalism with its emphasis on the “ordered” freedom of competitive entrepreneurs who pursue their interests in a market society ordered by a strong state (see Bonefeld, 2012, p. 638); or Austrian School liberalism, where political freedom is conceived as nothing but “the corollary of economic freedom” (Mises, 1974, p. 38) and private property rights are seen as “the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not” (Hayek, 2001, p. 108); or Chicago School liberalism, where it is claimed that economic freedom is the “necessary condition for political and civil freedom” and that property rights are “the most basic of human rights and an essential foundation for other human rights” (similarly Alchian, 2008; Friedman & Friedman, 1999, p. 605), the rhetoric always remains the same: freedom is grounded in the inviolability of (private) property.
Contrary to Locke or classical liberalism, however, neoliberals see property less as a natural right than as a right that has to be naturalized wherever it enhances the efficiency of market society. This shift is a second point at which neoliberal theory converges, even if the various approaches spell it out in different ways. For example, Hayek's cultural evolutionism explicitly echoes Locke's theory of property, but secularizes it by replacing God with competitive evolutionary mechanisms, understood in market terms (Hayek, 2013, p. 102). Other authors are more straightforwardly constructivist (Buchanan, 1975) or positivistic (Demsetz, 1967). But what they all share is the idea that the choice of an institutional framework of market society—property rights, among others—is subject to the same rationale as the choices within the market. (Here we can see Dardot and Laval's ‘universal principle of competition’ at work; see above, p. 2.) While Locke introduces God as the ultimate owner to naturalize private property, it is now the market's rationality that figures as the ultimate court of appeal.
If society is but a competitive market, strong property rights are the only means to realize personal freedom, as they enable everyone to participate in that market. The reconceptualization of these rights in entrepreneurial terms is a third point at which neoliberal theory converges. The shift from “Everyone an owner!” to “Everyone an entrepreneur!” does not come at all at once, it emerges gradually. It is present in the ordoliberal dream of “the peasant core of society,” an agricultural utopia with small‐scale landowners or entrepreneurs that aims to avert the threat of proletarianization by fragmenting and pacifying the working class (Röpke, 1996, p. 182). In the Austrian School, the new paradigm is developed more systematically. Mises reconceptualizes the economy from the perspective of its participants and ends up arguing that in “any real and living economy every actor is always an entrepreneur” (Mises, quoted in Kirzner, 1992, p. 30). Kirzner, his pupil, explains that “anyone is a potential entrepreneur, as the purely entrepreneurial role presupposes no special initial good fortune in the form of valuable assets” but only a specific mindset (Kirzner, 2015, p. 16). Chicago School neoliberalism takes up this approach and develops it into a comprehensive theory—human capital theory. This seals the equation of human agency or freedom and the economic activity of firms in competitive market environments, which forms the heart of what was to become the rationality of the neoliberal subject.
3.2 Neoliberal rationality: Capital in the person
Neoliberal rationality is an offspring of neoliberal theory but it is not identical to it. The political and cultural implementation of neoliberal theory is not just its application to practice, but rather, sends it through a number of filters, such as political and economic feasibility, sociocultural circumstances, hegemony, or the availability of disciplinary apparatuses (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 17 and passim). Rather than being uniform and continuous, it is a dynamic, heterogeneous, and localized process that gradually brings about neoliberalism's pervasive effects (Harvey) by establishing a new conduct of conduct (Foucault), or a new governmental rationality.1010 One of many constituents of that process, especially in the Global North, are the interventions of public intellectuals and the strategic work of think tanks and organizations who self‐conscious pursue a hegemonic struggle to influence public opinion. Milton Friedman, for instance, believed firmly that “public opinion will ultimately determine actual policy,” although typically with a delay of 20 to 30 years (Friedman, 1981)—and acted accordingly. See also Burgin (2012).
Wherever this rationality intersects with human agency or subjectivity, it promotes and enforces a new type of subject: the “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital” (Foucault, 2008, p. 226).
Importantly, this entrepreneurial orientation is not a dimension of the neoliberal subject but its very core. Seen from neoliberal rationality, we are not entrepreneurs and family members, friends, lovers or citizens, but in those very roles we are entrepreneurs, constantly trying to invest our time and abilities in the most profitable ways. This is, as Foucault reminds us, precisely the argument from human capital theory, as developed by Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker. Capital is everything that produces income; the human being, with its bodily and mental capacities produces income; therefore, it must be a form of capital. As bodily and mental capacities are essential features of humans, human beings are essentially capital, i.e., human capital.1111 Bourdieu's critical advancement of human capital theory claims to follow Marx’ conception of capital (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 241), but ends up construing it as a personal resource rather than a social relation. His resulting blindness to the self‐propelling logic of human capital and the different society it gives rise to misleads him into taking the effect for the cause when making “the methodical [and intentional] destruction of collectives” the “essence” of neoliberalism (Bourdieu, 1998). As Barnett (2010, p. 290) has argued, this accepts the neoliberal dichotomy between individual freedom and (collective) social justice and merely reverses its valence, replacing one idealization with another.
My argument is that this entrepreneurial subject, running its own existence like a firm through the acquisition, investment, and reassessment of human capital, is essentially an owner. Human capital, if this notion is to make sense at all, cannot be left unowned. It is no coincidence that the neoliberal self is not managerial, but entrepreneurial. While a manager runs an enterprise without owning it, the entrepreneur is by definition its owner (or partial owner). A manager's bonus payments might be at stake if she does a bad job, but not so her own capital.
This implication is rarely discussed explicitly (and if it is, it is often driven by a conflation of neoliberalism and libertarianism). One of the few exceptions is anthropologist Ilana Gershon, who notes the “move from the liberal vision of people owning themselves as though they were property to a neoliberal vision of people owning themselves as though they were a business” (Gershon, 2011, p. 539).1212 There are a few further exceptions in jurisprudence, reflecting the growing number of conflicts over the ownership of human capital. See Kahng (2017); Lobel (2015); Stone (2002).
This kind of argument, however, has not remained unchallenged. Michel Feher (2009, p. 34), for example, holds that “the relationship of a neoliberal subject to his or her human capital cannot be properly defined as ownership.” Feher's argument is that as neoliberal subjects cannot sell their human capital they cannot be said to own it, properly speaking: “rather than a possessive relationship, as that of the free laborer with his or her labor power, the relationship between the neoliberal subject and his or her human capital should be called speculative, in every sense of the word” (Feher, 2009, p. 34). Feher clearly has a point: there is an important difference between liberal and neoliberal subjects. The question is, however, whether this difference is best cast along the divide of ownership or speculation. I think, unsurprisingly, that Feher is too quick to dismiss the notion of self‐ownership. His argument fails for two reasons.
First, on a conceptual level, it assumes that property necessarily implies the right to sell. But while there is an intuitive association between property and alienability, the latter is not one of the defining features of property. The term inalienable property is not a contradiction in terms (see e.g., Epstein, 1985; Rose‐Ackerman, 1985). But if it isn't, then human capital might be inalienable and still count as property. And indeed, human capital is sometimes treated as a form of unalienable property, e.g., in US divorce and bankruptcy law (for a critical discussion see Sterk, 1993).
Second, Feher overstates the difference between labor power and human capital with respect to their alienability. If we think of human capital as inalienable it is probably because we cannot separate it from its owner (as Becker and Foucault have noted). However, strictly speaking, labor power is not separable from its owners either, as it cannot be disentangled from their mental and physical presence at the workplace, as Carole Pateman has famously argued. Nevertheless, we can contract it out, as every work contract witnesses; even if the separability of owner and owned is but a political fiction, a constant as‐if (Pateman, 1988). But if laborers can nevertheless be said to own their labor power (a claim Feher accepts), then it is not clear why the entrepreneurial self shouldn't be considered the owner of its capitals, too. Just like the liberal subject, it could contract out its human capitals as if it was separable from them.
And in fact, this is precisely what has recently become possible. In so‐called human capital contracts (HCCs), one can trade shares of one's human capital, fictive as they may be, to real‐world investors. One of the proponents of this idea dreams of a “global market where the value of Human Capital can be traded … either directly or through derivative securities,” enabling “capital to flow to wherever there is an opportunity to liberate value by investing in education” (Lleras, 2007, p. 162). Probably the most important form of HCCs are income share agreements.1313 Other forms of HCCs include post‐employment contracts, non‐compete clauses, and non‐solicitations. See Lobel (2015).
Discussing them more carefully will be helpful to tease out some implications of neoliberal rationality, and to assessing them critically.
3.3 Governing by debt: Income share agreements
In the USA student loans are the second biggest source of household debts, ranging at 1.5 trillion dollars and rising steadily (Economic Research, 2018). Recently, the ISAs have been proposed as an alternative to traditional student loans. A number of institutions and online‐based start‐ups have implemented ISAs, and the question of ISAs’ future keeps stirring public attention across political divides.1414 There are different models of ISAs. Some, such as the one that were implemented at the University of Yale in the 1970s, operate on collective rather than personal debt; others are personal but strictly non‐commercial (similar to some alumni funds). My argument is concerned only with commercial ISAs.
The guiding idea behind ISAs dates back to a 1955 book by Milton Friedman (for the history of ISAs see Schwartz, 2015). Friedman argues that while basic education (up until college) benefits all and should therefore be financed by the state, professional education is a private investment whose primary beneficiary is oneself. Therefore, it should be financed privately—that is, if necessary, by raising the wind at market conditions. In the absence of suitable collaterals for a loan, Friedman proposes that borrowers allow investors “to ‘buy’ a share in an individual's earning prospects: to advance him the funds needed to finance his training on condition that he agree to pay the lender a specified fraction of his future earnings” (Friedman, 1955, p. 138). In other words, Friedman proposes the use of human capital as collateral in exchange for higher education funding. While Friedman applies his idea only to professional education, it is not limited to this field and has been put to use in other contexts, too, e.g., in professional sports (see Schwartz, 2015, p. 1128).
In recent years a number of start‐ups have started to put Friedman's idea into practice. One of them is Pave.com, essentially a crowd‐funding website for human beings. The website brings together “backers” (financial institutions, wealthy individuals) and “talents,” who offer shares of their future income in exchange for funding. Using algorithms that predict their future income (based on a thorough assessment of their financial and personal situation) the website sets a certain price for those shares, a price that includes a robust return on investment rate for the investors if all goes well. To attract backers, the talents are advised to use social media to share their progress (Schwartz, 2015, p. 1131), literally transforming their social capital into a steady flow of cash, which is again invested into the self and its economic prospects.
There could hardly be a more straightforward application of human capital theory or neoliberal rationality more generally. ISAs bring some of those implications of entrepreneurial subjectivation to the table that often remain implicit in neoliberal theory. Most importantly for my argument, ISAs analyze human capital unequivocally as a form of property. One can only use as collateral what one owns—serving as a collateral for personal debt is one of the principal functions of private property.1515 Lumni, another commercial ISA provider, promotes its products with the catchphrase “Your talent is your best collateral!” (Lumni works similar to pave.com, but rather than directly connecting backers and talents they pool talents into human capital funds.)
If ISAs are, as I have argued, an epitome of neoliberal rationality, it follows that neoliberal rationality does indeed treat human capital as a form of property, a property in the person.
- It reinforces social inequalities. In a world of racial and gender wage gaps and unequal economic prospects, white male human capital is, quite simply, of higher value, and thus more attractive to investors (who, besides, tend to be from a very specific social milieu and to have their own biases and prejudices). This stabilizes conditions of inequality while hiding it behind a rhetoric of merit and personal responsibility. Income predictions thus transform into self‐fulfilling prophecies.
- It leads to precariousness by making people more dependent on outside conditions. As the value of human capital is not intrinsic but a positional good that is established only by market competition, it requires constant work on the self to be maintained (let alone enhanced), for one's competitors are never idle. But then, neoliberal rationality and entrepreneurial subjectivation do not provide existential security and independence from others, but make people more dependent on the market, requiring them to adapt constantly.1616 This implication is making itself felt in other social phenomena, too, as governmentality studies have emphasized. According to Olssen (2008, p. 41), lifelong learning approaches, for example, transform education into an entrepreneurial market discourse. Learning, in consequence, becomes “nothing more (or less) than the public collection of competencies offered in the labour market of learning opportunities. While many of these are useful, one can never have enough, and one can never have enough fast enough.”
Paradoxically, the precariousness of the borrowers feeds into the lenders’ stability.1717 If left unrestricted, ISAs even tend to establish neo‐feudal relations. Seen from the borrowers’ perspective, offering shares is a form of investment into their future. The artificial yet universal competition among them installed by ISAs nudges them towards “freely” making ever greater investments to outperform others, and thus towards ever greater degrees of risks or debt bondage that last, depending on the model, for decades or even a lifetime. - It leads to self‐censorship and ethical impoverishment. The universal competition installs a regime of “voluntary” self‐censorship that mutes alternative ways of being and acting. Joining a political protest, for example, or deviating from social norms in general, becomes a risky enterprise when one's future income is under constant scrutiny. Spending one's formative years under the Damocles’ sword of loosing the “trust” of one's ‘investors’ shapes one's subjectivity in ways that are almost impossible to assess, especially at that point in life.
My argument is not, of course, that ISAs capture all that is wrong with neoliberalism, nor even that they are a supremely important government technique of neoliberal rationality. All I claim is that ISAs condense some implications of the idea of entrepreneurial subjectivation that often remain implicit. If we accept (with Foucault) that in order to understand neoliberalism we have to understand neoliberal rationality and subjectivity; furthermore, that neoliberal subjectivity is essentially entrepreneurial and is epitomized in human capital theory; and that commercial ISAs are a straightforward exemplification of human capital theory—then we can see that the neoliberal subject is construed as self‐owning, even if this typically remains implicit.
However, we can also see that neoliberal subjectivation cannot possibly live up to its promises. Maurizio Lazzarato has provided an insightful analysis of this dark side of neoliberal subjectivity. He argues that the entrepreneurial subject is essentially a means to shift the costs and risks of a flexible and financialized economy towards the individual. To make an enterprise of oneself means not just investing in one's future earnings, but also taking “responsibility for poverty, unemployment, precariousness, welfare benefits, low wages, reduced pensions, etc., as if these were the individual's ‘resources’ and ‘investments’ to manage as capital, as ‘his’ capital.” (Lazzarato, 2012, p. 51) In times of constant economic crisis, Lazzarato argues, the universality of entrepreneurial man has given way to the universality of indebted man. Paradoxically, then, the promise of liberating the subject by treating her as the owner of her own person and capacities, for which she owes nothing to society (to use the famous phrase from Macpherson, 2011), ends up reiterating and institutionalizing the very dependency it claims to overcome. If you owe nothing to society, then society owes nothing to you; if society owes you nothing, you have to pay for all its services; if you cannot afford them, debt is the only way out. Thus, the neoliberal attempt to make everyone free by making everyone an entrepreneur ends up transforming everyone into a debtor—either literally, e.g., in ISAs, or metaphorically, e.g., in workfare policies, where the individual seems to owe her labor force to society at large.1818 In neoliberal workfare policy there has been a heated debate between human capital and work first approaches (see e.g., Peck & Theodore, 2000). Clearly, my discussion is more easily applicable to the first variant of neoliberal policy. (The latter remain much closer to Locke's conception of disciplinary mechanisms—Peck and Theodore speak of “the workhouse principle,” p. 135). The question of self‐ownership arguments in work first approaches would require more careful analysis. But insofar as they are not oriented towards a subject different from the entrepreneurial self, but rather propose a different way of achieving it, my argument still seems to apply. In line with this idea, more recent scholarship has observed a general shift towards human capital approaches that integrate work first elements for specific target groups (see Lindsay, McQuaid, & Dutton, 2007).
This tension between ownership and entrepreneurship and debt, however, is not the end of neoliberal rationality. Quite the opposite: it is the governmental technique most adequate to the production of the entrepreneurial self (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 70). With this technique, neoliberalism not only substitutes social rights (such as education, health care, retirement, and unemployment insurance) for a mere “right to contract debt” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 66), but also reduces economic and political uncertainty by making people more predictable and controllable. We see clearly that neoliberalism is not just a matter of markets growing wild, but is just as much a governmental technique of security states as of economic actors—which is another crucial pillar of its pervasiveness. And as in the case of Locke and his theistic appeals, these governmental techniques don't operate by limiting individual freedom from without, but by restructuring it from within. Neoliberal rationality governs not against, but through freedom (or at least the fiction of freedom). Entering debt contracts is a voluntary activity—and so is, to a degree, repaying them: If I produce no income, I don't have to pay back my ISAs. If I choose not to work under workfare policies, no one can literally force me into it. But making use of this “freedom” in a thoroughly economized society devoid of social rights amounts to little more than pushing oneself into poverty and sociopolitical isolation—that is, into social death. The pervasive effect of neoliberal rationality is not that it literally forces subjects to labor (in contrast to Locke's workhouses), but that it restructures freedom in such a way that it can only be pursued by competition and capitalism.
4 CONCLUSION: YOU ARE NOT A LOAN!
In the beginning of this article I emphasized the pervasive effects that help to stabilize the neoliberal project but are left unexplained by Marxist approaches, such as Harvey's. While adopting a broadly Foucauldian perspective on neoliberalism, I highlighted a category that Foucault tends (or chooses) to overlook: property, or more specifically the role of property in neoliberal rationality and subjectivity. Doing so allowed me to develop, as it were, a non‐economistic perspective on the interplay of economic and subjective categories, focusing on the notion of self‐ownership.
Self‐ownership is, from its very origins in Levellers discourse onwards, a discursive tool forged by socio‐political conflicts. As such, it always entails a certain vision of society. Originally aiming at emancipatory and democratic ends, it underwent its first subversion in the work of John Locke who, by treating God as the ultimate owner, naturalized private property and established a universal obligation to labor. In the hands of Locke, then, self‐ownership is about more than negative liberty: it inscribes a certain rationality—the rationality of landed property—onto the subject. Just like landed property, property in the person shouldn't lie to waste. As we have seen, Locke is not shy of backing up the implementation of this rationality by disciplinary apparatuses.
In neoliberalism, we have found a second, much more radical subversion of self‐ownership. Just like Locke, neoliberals emphasize strong private property rights, but they naturalize them by appealing to the market's efficiency instead of God. Freedom, in neoliberal theory, is conditional on strong property rights and free markets. The latter is spelled out in terms of unhampered entrepreneurial activity. In human capital theory, this entrepreneurial activity is itself analyzed in possessive categories, even if only implicitly: the entrepreneurial self owns and runs itself like a firm. Its ‘capital’ can be used as collateral and become the object of economic transaction and speculation. As before in the case of Locke, this inscribes a specific rationality onto the subject; only this time, it is the rationality of capital. The enforcement of this rationality becomes a pervasive governmental technique of neoliberalism (whether in ISAs, workfare policies, or elsewhere). This enforcement, however, frustrates the very promises it makes. If Locke's brilliance was found in his ability to use the Levellers’ egalitarian and emancipatory categories to stabilize rather than subvert prevailing power structures, then something very similar seems to be true for neoliberalism. Instead of treating everyone as equals, liberating them and allowing for self‐determination, the rhetoric that everyone is an entrepreneur! consolidates inequalities, precariousness, and ethical impoverishment. The entrepreneurial and the indebted subject are flipsides of the same coin. Neoliberal self‐ownership is the disease that itself purports to cure.
How is this spell to be broken? Perhaps it makes sense to remember that the notion of self‐ownership, long before it was subverted and abused, once started as a call for emancipation that challenged an existing power regime in the name of a different vision of society. If nothing else, we have seen how deeply this call for emancipation has shaped what was to come, even if often in surprising and contradictory ways. What would take the place of this call today? Occupy's ingenious slogan—’You are not a loan!’—might be a good point to start.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I am most grateful to Timo Jütten, Lorna Finlayson, Tilo Wesche, Andreas Hetzel and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
NOTES
Biography
Niklas Angebauer is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oldenburg (Germany). His current research focusses on questions of property in social and political philosophy.
