(On the rule of the road) What will happen if everybody uses their individual liberty?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Broadly speaking, liberty is the ability to do as one pleases. ... In this sense, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. Thus liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom.
As an imprecise and nebulous concept, there is no single “pure” form of neoliberalism. Instead, there are varied articulations that make up an extraordinarily messy amalgam of neoliberal ideas and policies at multiple sites (Latin America, Europe, China; Harvey, 2005), on multiple scales (national, international, transnational, global; Brown, 2015; Hall, 2011; Klein, 2007; Overbeek, 1993), and within the many versions of the welfare state (Kus, 2006). Additionally, according to England and Ward’s (2016) taxonomy, neoliberalism can be thought of as a form of statecraft that promotes the reduction of government spending while increasing economic completion (Mudge, 2008), or as a form of governmentality that comprises social, cultural and economic practices that constitute new spaces and subjects (Foucault, 2008). In addition, neoliberalism can be seen as a reaction to the disenchantment identified by Weber, (1978) following the rise of bureaucracy. Neoliberalism expresses a kind of re-enchantment with the exclusively individual rational actor, who claims a non-alienable space of liberty against a bureaucratic “iron cage”. Although some see neoliberalism as a privatized version of economic and bureaucratic despotism (Lorenz, 2012) or as a totalizing global bureaucracy (Hickel, 2016), this re-enchantment can explain the enthusiastic endorsement of neoliberal principles by a wide spectrum of political and ideological forces, for example by the Labour party under Blair in Great Britain, the SPD under Schröder in Germany, and followers of Pinochet in Chile.
Finally, neoliberalism has been viewed as a conception of the world, or a “total view of reality” (Ramey, 2015, p. 3), which is meant to be applied to the political realm and the entirety of human existence. Integrated into common sense, its main ideas stem from the everyday experience of buying and selling commodities on the market, a model that is then transferred to society. As a total view of reality, neoliberalism entails “a new understanding of human nature and social existence [and] the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects” (Read, 2009, p. 28; see also Foucault, 2008).
While acknowledging the disparate criteria for defining and assessing neoliberal theory and practice, we maintain that neoliberalism is a political outlook and reality (Bruff, 2014) which has evolved in part in accordance with the framework of the theoretical premises of Hayek’s, (1976) political economy and Nozick’s, (1974) philosophical libertarianism. For instance, neoliberal theoretical principles now provide, at a national and international level, substantive content to political constitutions (McCluskey, 2003), the establishment of laws governing the executive (Foucault, 2008; Read, 2009), and the reformulation of laws governing citizens (LeBaron, 2008; McCluskey, 2003; Supiot, 2013, p. 141; Wacquant, 1999). They also shape our comprehension of the world and ourselves (for example the reduction of the citizen to an entrepreneur; Peters, 2016). Thus, although there is no purely neoliberal society or state—neoliberalism evolves within various societies in different ways (see Harvey, 2005)—neoliberal political theory allows us to clarify the political premises that underlie the disparate versions of neoliberalism.