Second Thoughts on “The Death of the Social?”: Neoliberalism as Critique Stephen J. Collier The New School
“While the destabilization of social theory was pioneered by those who would describe themselves as progressives, the relation of those on the left to the transformations in the welfare state has been almost entirely negative. This is not surprising, given the intimate relations between socialism, as a rationality for politics, and the proliferation of social devices that made up welfare: the social state, social insurance, social service, the social wage, social protection, and the rest. But we need to interrogate this opposition, in which the forces of progress seem obliged to take the side of the social against the forces of reaction which stand for individualism, competition, the market, and the like” Nikolas Rose (1996) “The Death of the Social”i
“A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought….Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it; to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such.” Michel Foucault (1981) “Practicing Criticism”ii