Market metaphysics, atomized subject, and corrosion of human training in Hayek’s neoliberalism

Abstract

Neoliberalism may be best understood as a worldview that has exercised notorious hegemony in Western societies, especially since the early 1980s. In this sense, this text addresses one of the leading exponents of neoliberalism – Friedrich A. Hayek – and the notions of spontaneous order and methodological individualism, as formulated in his version of neoliberal theory. The objective of the undertaken effort was to demonstrate that the relationship existing in this author’s work between the defense of the neoliberal “metaphysical” spontaneous order of the market and an atomized understanding of the subject has, as a result, the centrality of a market sociability with de-legitimizing and corrosive implications for the modern Enlightenment sense of human (cultural) training. Among the possible consequences of this relationship is the weakening of key topics, such as action, freedom, equality, social justice, and autonomy, under the prism of a post-conventional morality demanded by today’s complex, plural, and unequal societies. From this perspective, the conclusion points to the need to recover the philosophical concept of action, formulated by the classical philosophical tradition, a post-metaphysical and post-traditional view of social order, a post-conventional conception of morality, and a social conception of freedom.